Saint Petersburg is the masterpiece of an imperial whim. At the start of the 18th century, Tsar Peter the Great decided to build a brand-new capital from nothing on a delta of marshy islands by the Baltic, a 'window on Europe' that would pull Russia out of its isolation. Thousands of labourers died raising it out of the mud, but the result was one of the most beautiful cities in the world: a grid of canals crossed by bridges, majestic avenues, pastel-coloured façades and a wealth of palaces, churches and museums that take your breath away.
For two centuries it was the capital of the tsars and the stage of Russian high culture: here you find the Hermitage, one of the largest museums on the planet, housed in the Winter Palace; the theatres where Russian ballet triumphed; the streets walked by Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Gogol. And it was here that the 1917 Revolution broke out and changed the 20th century. The city also survived one of the most atrocious episodes in history, the 900-day Nazi siege, which claimed more than a million lives and which its people remember with painful pride.
It's worth saying plainly: because of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions, travelling to Russia today has its particularities (no direct flights from the West, foreign cards that don't work, advisories from several governments). Saint Petersburg is a cultured and hospitable city, but it's wise to check the current situation, take out insurance and arrive with cash. This guide is informative and cultural, to help you understand and enjoy the old imperial capital.
Saint Petersburg was born of one man's will: in 1703, in the middle of the Great Northern War against Sweden, Peter the Great founded a fortress on the Neva delta and around it built a new, European-style city, which in 1712 he made the capital of Russia in place of Moscow. His successors —Elizabeth, Catherine the Great— filled it with Baroque and Neoclassical palaces and with the Hermitage. It was the heart of the Empire and its culture for two centuries, the scene of the Decembrist revolt of 1825 and the revolutions of 1905 and 1917: this is where the Bolsheviks seized power. Renamed Petrograd and later Leningrad, it lost its status as capital in 1918. During the Second World War it endured the 900-day German siege (1941-1944), which killed more than a million people through hunger and cold. In 1991 it got its original name back. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Peter the Great's window on Europe and the Russian north-west: from the medieval cradle of Novgorod to the old Prussia of Kaliningrad and the Arctic of Murmansk.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few great cities in the world have such a precise birth date and such a clear founding will. Saint Petersburg did not grow slowly out of a village: it was born all at once, from the obsession of a single man. On 27 May 1703, in the middle of the Great Northern War against Sweden, Tsar Peter the Great founded the Peter and Paul Fortress on an island in the delta of the Neva River, in a marshy, frozen territory just taken from the Swedes, beside the Baltic Sea. That is where he decided to build his new capital.
Peter's goal was both strategic and symbolic: to give Russia a port and an outlet to the sea towards Europe, and to create a 'window to the West' that would pull the country out of what he saw as the backwardness and isolation of old Moscow. He wanted a European city, modern and planned, with canals in the style of Amsterdam and palaces in the style of the Western courts. He brought in Italian, French and German architects, and forced nobles and merchants to move there.
The human cost was terrible. Tens of thousands of serfs and prisoners were brought in to work in appalling conditions, draining marshes, driving piles into the soft ground and dying by the thousands from fever, cold and exhaustion; Saint Petersburg is said to be 'the city built on bones'. But the tsar's will prevailed: in 1712 he moved the capital of the Empire there, taking it from Moscow, a status Saint Petersburg would keep for more than two centuries.
Over the 18th century, Saint Petersburg became one of the most dazzling capitals in Europe. The empresses who succeeded Peter filled it with palaces. Empress Elizabeth commissioned the architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli to build the Baroque Winter Palace and the great palaces on the outskirts, such as the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo. Catherine the Great (1762-1796), an enlightened and ambitious ruler, gave the city a neoclassical face, founded the Hermitage museum by buying entire collections of European art and turned Russia into a cultural power.
In the 19th century, Saint Petersburg was the political and cultural heart of the Empire. The enormous St Isaac's Cathedral and the Kazan colonnade went up; Nevsky Prospekt came alive; and the city was the stage for the golden age of Russian literature and music: its streets and salons were where Pushkin lived and wrote —he died in a duel in 1837—, along with Gogol, Dostoevsky, who set 'Crime and Punishment' here, and later Tchaikovsky and the great names of ballet.
But beneath the glitter, tension was boiling. In December 1825, a group of liberal officers, the 'Decembrists', rose up in Senate Square demanding a constitution; the revolt was crushed and its leaders executed or exiled to Siberia. In 1881, a revolutionary group killed Tsar Alexander II —the man who had abolished serfdom in 1861— with a bomb beside a canal in the centre; on that spot the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood was built. The contradiction between a lavish capital and an unjust society was pushing towards revolution.
Saint Petersburg was the stage where the fate of Russia's 20th century was decided. On 9 January 1905, 'Bloody Sunday', the imperial guard opened fire on a peaceful march of workers heading to the Winter Palace to deliver a petition to the tsar; the massacre sparked the Revolution of 1905, which forced Nicholas II to grant a parliament (the Duma).
The First World War sank the Empire. In 1914, in a burst of anti-German patriotism, the city swapped its Germanic name of Saint Petersburg for the Slavic Petrograd. But hunger, military defeats and discontent exploded in February 1917: demonstrations and mutinies in Petrograd forced the abdication of Nicholas II and the end of the Romanov monarchy, which had reigned since 1613. In October of that same year (by the old Russian calendar), Lenin's Bolsheviks staged a coup and seized power: the symbolic storming of the Winter Palace, seat of the provisional government, became the founding myth of the Soviet regime.
In 1918, fearing a German attack on the city, the Bolshevik government moved the capital back to Moscow. Petrograd thus lost the status Peter had given it two centuries earlier. In 1924, after Lenin's death, it was renamed Leningrad in his honour, a name it would carry for almost seven decades.
The most tragic and defining episode in the city's modern history was the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War, one of the longest and deadliest sieges in history. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Hitler's troops, with help from Finnish forces, encircled the city in September 1941 and kept it almost completely blockaded until January 1944: some 900 days.
The Nazi plan was not to take the city by storm, but to starve it into surrender and raze it. Leningrad was cut off, with barely any food, fuel or electricity, and bombed every day. The winter of 1941-1942 was the most horrific: the bread ration fell to little more than 100 grams a day, people died of hunger and cold in the streets, and extreme cases of desperation were documented. The only supply and evacuation route was the 'Road of Life', a track laid across the ice of Lake Ladoga in winter, along which food came in and civilians went out under enemy fire.
Estimates of the death toll vary, but it is thought that around a million civilians died, the vast majority of hunger, in addition to the soldiers who fell defending the city. Despite everything, the city did not surrender: its people kept working in the factories, and Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, composed partly during the siege and premiered in the besieged city in 1942, became a symbol of resistance. The blockade was broken in January 1944. Leningrad's suffering and fortitude were etched forever into Russian memory; the Piskaryovskoye Cemetery, where hundreds of thousands of victims lie in mass graves, is today a place of national mourning. It is a story worth telling without embellishment: the siege was a deliberate atrocity and a tragedy of immense proportions.
After the war, Leningrad was rebuilt and honoured as a 'Hero City'. Its palaces on the outskirts, looted and devastated by the Nazis —Peterhof, the Catherine Palace, whose legendary Amber Room vanished during the plunder—, were restored with a goldsmith's patience over decades. For the rest of the Soviet era, the city kept its cultural prestige, with the Hermitage, the Kirov ballet (now the Mariinsky again) and its universities, though always in Moscow's political shadow.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991 residents voted in a referendum to restore the city's original name, and Leningrad became Saint Petersburg again, although the province around it is still called Leningrad Oblast. The 1990s were hard, but since then the city has restored its heritage and consolidated its role as Russia's cultural capital and a major tourist destination.
Today Saint Petersburg is a metropolis of more than five million people, the second-largest in the country, with its historic centre declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco: a unique ensemble of canals, palaces and avenues that sums up Peter the Great's European dream. For travellers it is perhaps the most beautiful and 'Western' city in Russia, steeped in art and literature. It is worth exploring, though, with awareness of the present: like the whole country, it lives under the weight of the sanctions and isolation stemming from the war in Ukraine since 2022. Understanding its three centuries of history —the founding on the mud, the imperial splendour, the revolutions, the siege— is the best way to read what you see today along the banks of the Neva.
