Before 1900[edit]
Map of Saint Petersburg, 1744
Peter the Great was interested in seafaring and maritime affairs, and he intended to have Russia gain a seaport in order to be able to trade with other maritime nations.
[14] He needed a better seaport than
Arkhangelsk, which was on the
White Sea to the north and closed to shipping for months during the winter.
During its first few years, the city developed around Trinity Square on the right bank of the Neva, near the Peter and Paul Fortress. However, Saint Petersburg soon started to be built out according to a plan. By 1716 the
Swiss Italian Domenico Trezzini had elaborated a project whereby the city centre would be located on
Vasilyevsky Island and shaped by a rectangular grid of canals. The project was not completed, but is evident in the layout of the streets. In 1716, Peter the Great appointed French
Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond as the
chief architect of Saint Petersburg.
[20]
In 1736–1737 the city suffered from catastrophic fires. To rebuild the damaged boroughs, a committee under
Burkhard Christoph von Münnich commissioned a new plan in 1737. The city was divided into five boroughs, and the city center was moved to the Admiralty borough, situated on the east bank between the Neva and
Fontanka.
Established in 1762, the Commission of Stone Buildings of Moscow and Saint Petersburg ruled that no structure in the city can be higher than the Winter Palace and prohibited spacing between buildings. During the reign of
Catherine the Great in the 1760s–1780s, the banks of the Neva were lined with
granite embankments.
The most prominent neoclassical and
Empire-style architects in Saint Petersburg included:
- Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe (Imperial Academy of Arts, Small Hermitage, Gostiny Dvor, New Holland Arch, Catholic Church of St. Catherine)
- Antonio Rinaldi (Marble Palace)
- Yury Felten (Old Hermitage, Chesme Church)
- Giacomo Quarenghi (Academy of Sciences, Hermitage Theatre, Yusupov Palace)
- Andrey Voronikhin (Mining Institute, Kazan Cathedral)
- Andreyan Zakharov (Admiralty building)
- Jean-François Thomas de Thomon (Spit of Vasilievsky Island)
- Carlo Rossi (Yelagin Palace, Mikhailovsky Palace, Alexandrine Theatre, Senate and Synod Buildings, General Staff Building, design of many streets and squares)
- Vasily Stasov (Moscow Triumphal Gate, Trinity Cathedral)
- Auguste de Montferrand (Saint Isaac's Cathedral, Alexander Column)
With the
emancipation of the serfs undertaken by
Alexander II in 1861 and an
industrial revolution, the influx of former peasants into the capital increased greatly. Poor boroughs spontaneously emerged on the outskirts of the city. Saint Petersburg surpassed Moscow in population and industrial growth; it developed as one of the largest industrial cities in Europe, with a major naval base (in
Kronstadt), river and sea port.
1900 to present[edit]
On September 1, 1914, after the outbreak of
World War I, the Imperial government renamed the city
Petrograd, meaning "Peter's City", to remove the German words
Sankt and
Burg.
In September and October 1917, German troops
invaded the
West Estonian archipelago and threatened Petrograd with bombardment and invasion. On March 12, 1918, the Soviets transferred the government to Moscow, to keep it away from the state border. During the ensuing
Civil War, in 1919 general
Yudenich advancing from Estonia repeated the attempt to capture the city, but
Leon Trotsky mobilized the army and forced him to retreat.
On January 26, 1924, five days after Lenin's death, Petrograd was renamed
Leningrad. Later some streets and other
toponyms were renamed accordingly. The city has over 230 places associated with the life and activities of Lenin. Some of them were turned into museums,
[24] including the
cruiser Aurora – a symbol of the October Revolution and the oldest ship in the
Russian Navy.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the poor outskirts were reconstructed into regularly planned boroughs.
Constructivist architecture flourished around that time. Housing became a government-provided
amenity; many "bourgeois" apartments were so large that numerous families were assigned to what were called "communal" apartments (
kommunalkas). By the 1930s, 68% of the population lived in such housing. In 1935 a new general plan was outlined, whereby the city should expand to the south. Constructivism was rejected in favor of a more pompous
Stalinist architecture. Moving the city center further from the border with Finland,
Stalin adopted a plan to build a new city hall with a huge adjacent square at the southern end of
Moskovsky Prospekt, designated as the new main street of Leningrad. After the Second World War, the Soviet-Finnish border moved northwards. Nevsky Prospekt with Palace Square maintained the functions and the role of a city center.
In December 1931, Leningrad was administratively separated from
Leningrad Oblast. At that time it included the Leningrad Suburban District, some parts of which were transferred back to Leningrad Oblast in 1936 and turned into
Vsevolozhsky District,
Krasnoselsky District, Pargolovsky District and Slutsky District (renamed Pavlovsky District in 1944).
[25]
Citizens of Leningrad during the 872-day
siege, in which about one million civilians died
On December 1, 1934,
Sergey Kirov, the popular communist leader of Leningrad, was assassinated, which became the pretext for the
Great Purge.
[26]
During
World War II,
German forces besieged Leningrad following the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
[27] The siege lasted 872 days,
[27] from September 1941 to January 1944.
[28] The
Siege of Leningrad proved one of the longest, most destructive, and
most lethal sieges of a major city in
modern history. It isolated the city from most supplies except those provided through the
Road of Lifeacross
Lake Ladoga. More than one million civilians died, mainly from starvation. Many others were eventually evacuated or escaped, so the city became largely depopulated.
In October 1946 some territories along the northern coast of the
Gulf of Finland, which had passed to the USSR from Finland in 1940 under the
peace treaty following the
Winter War, were transferred from Leningrad Oblast to Leningrad and divided into
Sestroretsky District and
Kurortny District. These included the town of
Terijoki (renamed
Zelenogorskin 1948).
[25] Leningrad and many of its suburbs were rebuilt over the post-war decades, partially according to pre-war plans. The 1948 general plan for Leningrad featured radial
urban development in the north as well as in the south. In 1953 Pavlovsky District, Leningrad Oblast|Pavlovsky District in Leningrad Oblast was abolished, and parts of its territory, including Pavlovsk, merged with Leningrad. In 1954 the settlements
Levashovo,
Pargolovo and
Pesochny merged with Leningrad.
[25]
Leningrad gave its name to the
Leningrad Affair (1949–1952), a notable event in the postwar political struggle in the
USSR. It was a product of rivalry between Stalin's potential successors where one side was represented by the leaders of the city
Communist Party organization—the second most significant one in the country after Moscow. The entire elite leadership of Leningrad was destroyed, including the former mayor
Kuznetsov, the acting mayor Pyotr Sergeevich Popkov, and all their deputies; overall 23 leaders were sentenced to the
death penalty, 181 to prison or exile (exonerated in 1954). About 2,000 ranking officials across the USSR were expelled from the party and the Komsomol and removed from leadership positions.
[29]
The
Leningrad Metro underground
rapid transit system, designed before the war, opened in 1955 with its first eight stations decorated with marble and bronze. However, after the death of Stalin in 1953, the perceived ornamental excesses of the Stalinist architecture were abandoned. From the 1960s to the 1980s many new residential boroughs were built on the outskirts; while the
functionalist apartment blocks were nearly identical to each other, many families moved there from
kommunalkas in the city centre in order to live in separate apartments.
View from the Colonnade, St. Isaac's Cathedral, Saint Petersburg
Standard "Home-Ship" (1970s–1980s)
Meanwhile, economic conditions started to deteriorate as the country tried to adapt to major changes. For the first time since the 1940s, food
rationing was introduced, and the city received humanitarian
food aid from abroad.
[30] This dramatic time was depicted in photographic series of Russian photographer
Alexey Titarenko.
[31][32] In 1995 a northern section of the
Kirovsko-Vyborgskaya Line of the
Saint Petersburg Metro was cut off by underground flooding, creating a major obstacle to the city development for almost ten years.
In 1996,
Vladimir Yakovlev defeated
Anatoly Sobchak in the elections for the head of the
city administration. The title of the city head was changed from "mayor" to "governor". In 2000 Yakovlev won re-election. His second term expired in 2004; the long-awaited restoration of broken subway connection was expected to finish by that time. But in 2003 Yakovlev suddenly resigned, leaving the governor's office to
Valentina Matviyenko.
The law on election of the City Governor was changed, breaking the tradition of democratic election by a universal suffrage. In 2006 the
city legislature re-approved Matviyenko as governor. Residential building had intensified again;
real-estate prices inflated greatly, which caused many new problems for the preservation of the historical part of the city.
Although the central part of the city has a
UNESCO designation (there are about 8,000 architectural monuments in Petersburg), the preservation of its historical and architectural environment became controversial.
[33] After 2005, the demolition of older buildings in the historical centre was permitted.
[34] In 2006
Gazprom announced an ambitious project to erect a
396-meter skyscraper opposite to
Smolny, which
[according to whom?] could result in the loss of the unique line of Petersburg landscape.
[citation needed] Urgent protests by citizens and prominent public figures of Russia against this project were not considered by Governor
Valentina Matviyenko and the city authorities until December 2010, when after the statement of President
Dmitry Medvedev, the city decided to find a more appropriate location for this project.
