HISTORY OF ST. PETERSBURG



With the statue of Peter the Great on horseback with his finger thrust forward, this man represents the city, which is ambitious, optimistic and uncomprimising, Peter built this city around the time he was fighting a war against Charles II of Sweden. Peter wanted to build a window through to Europe and this city was his lasting legacy. The city was built by slaves and thousands of prisoners of war in very marshy and torrid conditions which lead to many deaths. He defeated the Swedes in 1710 at Poltava and by 1715 much of the city was well underway while Peter relocated the government here eventhough there was a continuous threat of flooding.

Peter died in 1725 and is thanked especially for his involvement in the construction of the Summer Gardens and the Kunstkammer Museum as well as the Peterhof.

Catherine the Great was a great scholar and appreciated the arts. She was responsible for the Smolnyi Cathedral as well as the Hermitage which is now one of the worlds greatest museums due to her own art collection in the Winter Palace.

Whispers of Revolution were beginning to surface as far back as 1860 and even the great Russian writer Dostoevskii was sent off to Siberia for a period of exile due to his involvement with a group of St. Petersburg dissidents. In around the 1870s there were demonstrations outside the Kazan Cathedral and in the year 1881 the Tsar Alexander II was shot in just where now stands the Church on Spilled Blood. The city was getting more volatile with students and workers beginning to talk revolution. A minor revolution took place in 1905 which was called Bloody Sunday where the government forces fired on a peaceful protest outside the Winter Palace.

 

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