Saint Petersburg, from 1924 to 1991 in Leningrad renamed, with over 4.8 million inhabitants, after Moscow’s second largest city of Russia and one of the largest cities Europe. St. Petersburg is located in the northwest of the country at the mouth of the Neva River in the Newabucht at the east end of the Gulf of Finland and the northernmost metropolis in the world. It was in 1703 by Peter the Great founded on marshy ground near the sea to the right of access to Russia’s Baltic Sea to enforce. Shortly after its founding it was called St. Peter’s Burch, was then more than 200 years the name of Germany, 1914 to 1924 she was called Petrograd and became the Soviet era after Lenin called Leningrad.The city was of 18 to the 20th Century, the capital of the Russian Empire, is an important European cultural center and houses the most important Russian Baltic Sea port. The city is world heritage of UNESCO. Will be different as often assumed, has Peter the Great, the city is not named after himself, but after his patron saint, the apostle Simon Peter. After the fortress the Dutch name St. Pieterburch wore, it was early in the German St. Petersburg renamed. After the outbreak of the First World War on 18 August 1914, the German name to Petrograd – literally, “Peter city” – Russified. After Lenin’s death in 1924 the city was on 26 January 1924 in Leningrad renamed. This was done at the request of the then Petrograd party leadership and to the information requested by the workers, Lenin’s death mourned.The new name change to the city by the Central Committee on the grounds that in it, led by Lenin, October Revolution had taken place. At the level of symbolic politics, but there were deeper reasons for this: St Petersburg was the Russian Empire and was the flagship city of the Tsar’s empire was. Even then, St. Petersburg was the second largest city in the country and that meant great prestige for the new namesake. The renamed Leningrad symbolized the changing social and political system in a highlighted position. As such, he was perceived.
The founding of the city of St. Petersburg is the subject of a woven by Peter the Great political myth. After that, the far-sighted Czar an uninhabited and barren marshland at the first sight even at the Neva estuary to the site of his future capital, a “window to Europe” for Russia , have chosen. The word most powerful and most frequently quoted formulation of the myth of a “capital out of nothing” creator’s Peter the Great Spirit is found in the poem The Bronze Horseman (1834) by Alexander Pushkin.