St. Petersburg: Culturally Rich and Historical City of Russia
Dr. Syed Mehboob
Economic and Political Analyst
Russia has many attractive, beautiful, and historical places worth seeing. Among them, St. Petersburg is prominent. St Petersburg is rich in cultural and historical heritage and one of the most popular tourist attractions.
St. Petersburg, one of the most important and historical cities of Russia, was founded in 1703 by Peter the Great. It is a major cultural and historical hub on the Baltic Sea, renowned as the former imperial capital for two centuries. It is celebrated for its stunning architecture, the Hermitage Museum, and the Mariinsky Theatre, with over 5.6 million inhabitants, making it Russia’s second-largest city. It is located in northwestern Russia, and it is the world’s northernmost city with over one million people. The city’s historic center is a UNESCO Heritage Site, offering a deeply historical atmosphere with well-preserved 18th and 19th century building.
St. Petersburg is situated on the River Neva, and it has an area of 1,439 square kilometers. It is the fourth most populous city in Europe. As the former capital of the Russian Empire and a historically strategic port, it is governed as a federal city. The city was founded by Tsar Peter the Great on 27 May 1703 on the site of a captured Swedish fortress, and was named after the apostle Saint Peter. In Russia, St. Petersburg is historically and culturally associated with the birth of the Russian Empire. As Russia’s cultural center, it receives millions of tourists every year. It is also considered an important economic, scientific, and tourism center of Russia. It is home to notable government bodies such as the Constitutional Court of Russia and the Heraldic Council of the President of the Russian Federation. It is also home to the National Library of Russia and a planned location of the Supreme Court of Russia, as well as home to the headquarters of the Russian Navy and the Leningrad Military District of the Russian Armed Forces. The Historical Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Group of Monuments constitute a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is home to the Hermitage, which is one of the largest art museums in the world. It was one of the host cities of the 2018 FIFA World Cup and the UEFA Euro 2020. The city is also home to 87th storey Lakhta Center, the tallest building in Russia and one of the tallest buildings in the world. It is also called “the window on Europe “ and is also called Russia’s cultural capital.
Three distinctive characteristics of St. Petersburg engage attention. The first is the city’s harmonious mix of Western European and Russian architecture, the second is St. Petersburg’s unequivocal city center, which in other Russian cities of medieval origin is defined by kremlin and its surrounding area. The third characteristic of the city is its many waterways. The city spreads across forty-two islands of the delta and across adjacent parts of the mainland floodplain.
The population of St. Petersburg is overwhelmingly Russian. Before the Revolution, the city had sizable Polish, Baltic, and German communities.
St. Petersburg is second only to Moscow among Russian cities in terms of industrial output. In the late Soviet era, more than half of the city’s working population was employed in factories and building trades. Its shipbuilding industry is still important and remains one of the largest of its kind in Russia; it produces icebreakers, tankers, timber carriers, and fishing vessels. Other sectors of heavy engineering make armaments and rolling stock. Of national importance are plants producing nuclear reactors and others that manufacture electrical and power machinery, such as steam, hydraulic, and gas generators. Other factories produce cable, diesel engines, batteries, generators, medical equipment, cameras, elevator parts, and automotive machinery. Food processing became the second largest industry in St. Petersburg after large breweries and a dairy combine opened in the city.
The city’s banking network is well developed and includes branches of many international banks. At the onset of the twenty-first century, services accounted for about three-fifths of the city’s economic sector. St. Petersburg’s flourishing retail trade focuses on a wide range of consumer goods such as cotton and woolen textiles, clothing, footwear, and tobacco products, with the city itself as its principal market.
St. Petersburg is one of Russia’s most important hubs of transportation. Its port, the country’s largest, is of international significance. The main harbor is protected by breakwaters and is reached by a dredged channel from Kranshtad. Ferries maintain regular summer services to several western European ports. By 2000, St. Petersburg’s seaport was receiving hundreds of foreign cruise ships annually. Smaller seagoing ships have access by way of the Neva to Lake Ladoga and thence throughout the inland waterway system of European Russia.
The city is a focus of rail routes, with trunk lines radiating to Helsinki and Warsaw as well as to Moscow and other major Russian cities. There are several principal passenger rail terminals—including the Moscow, Vitebsk, Warsaw, and Baltic stations. A network of suburban electric services connects the outer parts of St. Petersburg and its satellite towns. Internal city traffic is carried by a subway system (opened in 1955) and a well-developed network of buses, streetcars, and trolley bus lines.
Like Moscow, Petersburg has since 1931 been designated a “city of republican subordination”; that is, its city council is directly subordinate to the government of the Russian republic, whereas elsewhere in Russia cities are subordinated to the oblast (province) or republic in which they are located. The city itself is divided into rations (districts), and several suburban districts are subordinate to the St. Petersburg city government. Most rural districts in the orbit of St. Petersburg are subordinate to the provincial government of the Leningrad Oblast (which, unlike the city, retained its Soviet-era name). Although located in St. Petersburg and sharing some responsibilities and institutions with the city, the provincial government is itself a separate “subject” of the Russian Federation. As a residue of the city’s former status as capital, certain organizations still maintain their national headquarters in St. Petersburg, among them the Russian geographic, chemical, and medical societies.
St. Petersburg is fully equipped with the health services of a modern city, but the overall quality of health care deteriorated in the 1990s along with the city’s shrinking economy. Although many private health clinics opened whose quality of care surpassed that of the state-run facilities, the latter were still the only option for the majority of the population, who could not afford private care (as in the rest of Russia, public health care in St. Petersburg is free). At the beginning of the 21st century, there were several hundred public and private clinics providing medical and dental care and maternity and nursing services. Medical care is provided by the city’s many general and specialized hospitals.
St. Petersburg is one of Russia’s most important centers for education and scientific research; a sizable proportion of the employed population is engaged in education, the arts, and the sciences. There are dozens of public and private universities in St. Petersburg, which has the second largest concentration of institutions of higher education in Russia. Heading the list is St. Petersburg State University, founded in 1724 as the University of St. Petersburg. No less renowned and nearly as old are the Academy of Arts (1757), the Institute of Mines (1773), and the Military Medical Academy (1798).
A focus for research is the library of the Russian Academy of Sciences (from 1925 to 1991 the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R.), which remained in the city when the academy’s headquarters moved back to Moscow after the Revolution. The research establishments of the Academy of Sciences in the city include the Pulkovo Observatory, along with the Botanical, Geological, Forestry, and Zoological institutes, among many others. The city is the principal center in Russia for Arctic research, notably at the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute and the Institute for the Study of Permafrost.
St. Petersburg evolved as a city of culture, and the number and quality of its cultural institutions remain one of its enduring attractions. It has many large and grand, as well as small but reputable, theatres and auditoriums. The Mariinsky Theatre (called the Kirov State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet during the Soviet period) has long enjoyed an international reputation, and its resident company is frequently on tour abroad. Other important theatres are the Maly, Tovstonogov, Pushkin, and Musical Comedy theatres. The largest of several concert halls is the October Great Concert Hall, which seats some 4,000 people. The city’s musical tradition has been enhanced by the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory. Notable museums include the Hermitage and the State Russian Museum, both of international prominence. The latter museum traces the history of Russian art from the 10th century to the present. St. Petersburg is a significant center of the country’s motion-picture industry and has been host to the annual Kino Expo International Convention for Russian cinema at its exhibition center on the waterfront.
There are a large number of libraries in the city, headed by the Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library on Nevsky Prospekt, established in 1795; of all the libraries in Russia, it is second only to Moscow’s Russian State Library (formerly the V.I. Lenin Library). Another important specialized collection is the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), on Vasilevskiy Island.
St. Petersburg has abundant recreational facilities and green spaces for such a large city. Among the notable stadiums in the area is Kirov Stadium. Other opportunities for outdoor recreation are provided by the Kirov Park of Culture and Rest, the zoo, the botanical gardens, and numerous other smaller parks and gardens.
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