Saint Petersburg

Peter the Great founded the city on 27 May 1703 on the site of a captured Swedish fortress at the mouth of the Neva, wanting a seaport to trade with Europe better than Arkhangelsk, which froze in winter. He named it after the apostle Peter and made it the capital from 1712. In 1724 he founded the Academy of Sciences and the university here, and over the 18th and 19th centuries the city grew into one of the largest industrial cities in Europe, with a seaport and the naval base at Kronstadt. When the First World War began in 1914 it was renamed Petrograd to drop the German words Sankt and Burg.

Petrograd was the stage of the revolutions of 1917, after which the Bolsheviks moved the government to Moscow. In January 1924, days after Lenin's death, the city became Leningrad, and the large flats of the old middle classes were divided into kommunalkas, communal apartments shared by several families. The siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days, from 8 September 1941 to 27 January 1944; more than a million civilians died, mainly of starvation, and the population fell from about three million to under 600,000.

After the war the metro opened in 1955 and huge estates of near-identical apartment blocks were built on the outskirts from the 1960s. In a referendum on 12 June 1991, 55 per cent of voters chose to restore the name Saint Petersburg, and Anatoly Sobchak became the first directly elected mayor. Gazprom later re-registered here, and its 462-metre Lakhta Center became the tallest building in Russia and Europe. Since 2022 the war has cut the city's old links westward: UEFA moved the Champions League final away, and the trains to Helsinki stopped.

Saint Petersburg is Russia's cultural centre, with architecture and culture strongly inspired by Western Europe. Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoyevsky made its streets, clerks and ghosts a central subject of Russian literature, followed by Blok, Mandelshtam and Anna Akhmatova, and the apartments of many writers and composers are now museums. Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Prokofiev are among the conservatory's alumni, and Shostakovich, who was born and raised here, dedicated his Seventh Symphony to the city. The Mariinsky Theatre remains one of the great houses of opera and ballet.

The city also gave Russia its rock music: bands that emerged from the underground in the 1970s founded the Leningrad Rock Club, which gave a stage to DDT, Kino, Alisa and others. Football is followed with passion, and Zenit won six league titles in a row from 2018–19 to 2023–24 and another in 2025–26. In summer the White Nights Festival fills the city with concerts, ballet and fireworks, crowned by Scarlet Sails on the Neva.

The city has 221 museums and more than 80 theatres. The memory of the siege is kept with great seriousness, and 27 January, the day it was lifted, is marked every year, with the Piskaryovskoye cemetery at the centre of remembrance.

About 5.6 million people lived in the city at the 2021 census, and more than 6.4 million in the metropolitan area, making it the fourth most populous city in Europe and the world's northernmost city of more than a million. From the 1960s many families moved out of the communal flats of the centre into the new estates of the outskirts.

The city is a major trade gateway and industrial centre, with oil and gas trading, shipyards, aerospace, electronics and software, and car plants. The Great Port of Saint Petersburg has cargo terminals at Petrodvorets, Kronstadt and Lomonosov, and the city links the Baltic with inland Russia through the Volga–Baltic Waterway. Saint Petersburg State University, with about 32,000 undergraduates, is the largest of its many universities.

The year sets the rhythm of daily life: days of less than six hours in late December, and white nights in June when the streets stay alive around the clock and the bridges over the Neva are raised each night for passing ships.

The city's own institutions are modest. Pyshki, sugared doughnuts eaten with coffee, are sold in plain cafés, and in spring the city celebrates koryushka, a small smelt said to smell of fresh cucumber, fried and sold everywhere and honoured with its own festival. Shaverma, the local name for shawarma, is the everyday street food.

Restaurants serve the Russian classics — borsch and shchi, pelmeni dumplings, beef stroganoff and blini — along with zakuski such as herring under a fur coat, pickled cucumbers and black bread, and kvass in summer. The lakes and forests of the Northwest supply fish, mushrooms and berries such as cloudberries, lingonberries and cranberries, made into jams and mors fruit drinks.

The grandest place to shop for food is the Eliseyev Emporium on Nevsky Prospekt, a food hall built in 1902–1903 with one of the finest Art Nouveau interiors in the city. Rubinshteyna Street, near the Fontanka, is one of the city's most popular streets for nightlife.