49 Fun Facts About St. Petersburg

On which river does St. Petersburg stand?

The Neva fans into a delta at the Gulf of Finland, so the city spreads across dozens of islands, and its bridges and canals earned it the nickname "Venice of the North".

Which ruler founded St. Petersburg in 1703?

Peter the Great wanted a seaport facing western Europe, so he built his "window on Europe" on marshy islands his army had only just captured.

Which St. Petersburg jeweller made jewelled Easter eggs for Russia's last two tsars?

Fabergé made the first in 1885 as a tsar's Easter gift to his wife: an enamel egg hiding a golden yolk and a tiny gold hen. The custom lasted until the revolution.

What was St. Petersburg called from 1914 to 1924?

Petrograd, a Russian form of the name, replaced the German-sounding original weeks after Russia went to war with Germany in 1914.

What name did St. Petersburg carry from 1924 until 1991?

Leningrad never fully vanished: when the city took back its old name in 1991, the surrounding region stayed Leningrad Oblast, as it still is.

St. Petersburg voted to restore its name the day Russia first elected which president?

Yeltsin won Russia's first presidential election on 12 June 1991, the day of the city's vote; two months later he rallied Moscow against a hard-line coup, and by the year's end the Soviet Union was gone.

What does St. Petersburg call its summer weeks when the sky never fully darkens?

White nights come from the city's latitude, close to 60° north: around midsummer the sun dips only a little below the horizon, so twilight lasts until dawn.

What killed most civilians who died in St. Petersburg's 872-day World War II siege?

Starvation: with the city encircled, the daily bread ration shrank to a couple of thin slices, and hundreds of thousands of people died in the first winter alone.

During the World War II siege, supplies reached St. Petersburg across the ice of which lake, Europe's largest?

Ladoga's winter ice became the "Road of Life": trucks and sleds crossed the frozen lake with food and fuel and carried evacuees out the other way.

Who moved the Soviet government from St. Petersburg to Moscow in March 1918?

Lenin's move handed the title of capital back to Moscow, which had lost it to St. Petersburg two centuries earlier.

Which museum occupies the former imperial residence on St. Petersburg's Palace Embankment?

The Hermitage began in 1764 as an empress's private gallery beside her palace and stayed closed to the public for almost ninety years, until 1852.

The storming of the Winter Palace in 1917 is known as which event?

The October Revolution fell on 7 November by today's reckoning: Russia still kept the old Julian calendar, which by then ran 13 days behind the Gregorian one.

As of 2025, Europe's tallest building is St. Petersburg's Lakhta Center, the headquarters of which Russian energy giant?

Gazprom first planned its tower in the old centre, opposite Smolny Cathedral; protests over the historic skyline pushed the 462-metre building out to the city's edge.

What is the name of St. Petersburg's main avenue?

Nevsky Prospekt began as the start of the road to Novgorod and is named for the Alexander Nevsky Monastery at its far end.

St. Petersburg's Bronze Horseman statue shares its name with a famous poem by which Russian writer?

Alexander Pushkin's poem has the bronze rider come to life after a flood and chase a poor young man through the empty streets, and it made the statue's nickname stick.

The 1825 Decembrist revolt was directed against which new tsar?

Nicholas I became tsar only because his elder brother Constantine had given up the throne; rebel officers used the confusion to stop troops swearing loyalty, and five of them were hanged.

Which tsar's 1881 murder is marked by St. Petersburg's Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood?

Alexander II, who had freed Russia's serfs in 1861, was mortally wounded by a revolutionary's bomb, and the church was built on the very spot where he fell.

Rastrelli's 1750s Winter Palace is a landmark of which architectural style?

Baroque: Rastrelli's lavish version is named Elizabethan Baroque after the empress who approved his design in 1754 but died shortly before the palace was finished.

Which St. Petersburg cathedral took architect Auguste de Montferrand 40 years to build?

Saint Isaac's Cathedral went up between 1818 and 1858; the Soviets closed it and made it a museum in the 1930s, and as of 2025 it still is one.

Which war does the Alexander Column, unveiled in 1834 on St. Petersburg's Palace Square, commemorate?

The Patriotic War of 1812 is Russia's name for the defeat of Napoleon's invasion; the column's 600-tonne granite shaft was hauled upright in under two hours, with no modern cranes to help.

Why are St. Petersburg's main river bridges closed to traffic for hours on summer nights?

To let ships through: from April to November the big spans are raised each night for cargo vessels, cutting the islands off from each other while crowds gather to watch.

Which St. Petersburg museum, begun in 1714 as a tsar's collection of curiosities, is often called Russia's first?

The Kunstkamera spent its early years in a mansion confiscated from a nobleman who was executed in 1718 for plotting with the tsar's son, until its own building was ready.

Which composer was among the first graduates of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, founded by Anton Rubinstein in 1862?

Pyotr Tchaikovsky enrolled while a clerk at the Ministry of Justice and soon quit the post for music; he graduated in 1865 and left at once to teach at the new conservatory in Moscow.

Which composer dedicated his Seventh Symphony to St. Petersburg during the World War II siege?

Dmitri Shostakovich's symphony was played inside the blockaded city in August 1942 by a depleted orchestra, while loudspeakers carried the music out toward the German lines.

Which treasure did German troops strip from the Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg in 1941, never to be found?

The Amber Room was dismantled in 36 hours and shipped to Königsberg, where its trail ends; a replica that took craftsmen more than twenty years opened in the palace in 2003.

By what name was St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre known for most of the Soviet era?

Kirov was the name its ballet carried to Paris in 1961, when its young star Rudolf Nureyev slipped his KGB minders at the airport and asked for asylum.

Which football club is St. Petersburg's main team?

Zenit won six Russian league titles in a row from 2019 to 2024, then lost a seventh to Krasnodar on the final day of the 2024–25 season.

Which European trophy did St. Petersburg's leading football club win in 2008?

The UEFA Cup came with a 2–0 win over Rangers in Manchester, and man of the match Andrey Arshavin, born in the city, earned a record move to Arsenal months later.

Who was murdered in the cellar of St. Petersburg's Yusupov Palace in December 1916?

Grigori Rasputin was lured there by Prince Felix Yusupov, whose memoir claimed poison and bullets could not kill him; in fact little is certain beyond three gunshot wounds.

Which team did France beat 1–0 in the 2018 World Cup semi-final played in St. Petersburg?

Belgium went out to a header from French defender Samuel Umtiti at the Krestovsky Stadium, which had opened only a year earlier after almost a decade of building work.

Which University of St. Petersburg professor drew up his periodic table of the elements in 1869?

Dmitri Mendeleev left gaps in his table for elements nobody had found yet and predicted what they would be like; gallium, scandium and germanium later filled them.

As of 2025, St. Petersburg's metro holds which record among world subways?

Deepest, by the average depth of its stations: digging began in 1941, stopped within months when Germany invaded, and the first line opened only in 1955.

Which St. Petersburg-born poet, forced out of the Soviet Union in 1972, won the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature?

Joseph Brodsky was tried in his home city in 1964 as a "social parasite" and sentenced to five years of hard labour in the far north, though he was released early.

Which novelist had a narrator call St. Petersburg the most "intentional" city on the whole globe?

Dostoyevsky gave the line to the narrator of Notes from Underground; in 1849 he had been marched before a firing squad in the city and reprieved at the last moment.

Peterhof, the fountain-filled estate outside St. Petersburg, was built to rival which royal palace?

Versailles was the model, and the nickname "Russian Versailles" stuck; German troops wrecked the estate in World War II, so much of what visitors see was rebuilt afterwards.

A 1997 film shot around St. Petersburg was the first Western screen version of which Tolstoy novel made on Russian soil?

Anna Karenina, with Sophie Marceau and Sean Bean, was filmed in the Winter Palace and other real settings instead of studio sets; only two minor scenes were shot in Moscow.

St. Petersburg's Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood was modelled largely on which Moscow landmark?

St. Basil's Cathedral was the model because the new tsar wanted an old-Russian church, in pointed contrast to the Western-looking city around it.

St. Petersburg became capital in 1712 on land Russia had seized from which kingdom?

Sweden did not formally give up the land until the Treaty of Nystad in 1721, so for nine years Russia's capital stood on ground that was still legally Swedish.

Empress Anna's 1740 palace in St. Petersburg, where her court jester spent his wedding night, was made entirely of what?

Ice: she had made a disgraced prince her jester, and after a forced wedding the couple rode to the palace in a cage on an elephant's back and were shut in its frozen bedchamber under guard.

Which St. Petersburg island faces the Winter Palace across the river and holds the old Stock Exchange?

Vasilyevsky was planned as the heart of the city, with canals for streets; the scheme was dropped, but its numbered cross-streets are still called "lines".

A much-repeated chess legend says the tsar gave which title to the five finalists at St. Petersburg in 1914?

Grandmaster: the earliest known tellings date from 1940 and 1942, the second in finalist Frank Marshall's memoir, and nothing from 1914 has been found to back them. The title became official only in 1950.

Which ballet was first performed at St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre in December 1892?

The Nutcracker shared the bill with a one-act opera by the same composer, who wrote afterwards that the opera had pleased but the ballet had not; its worldwide fame came much later.

Which American novelist was born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg in 1905 and left Soviet Russia in 1926?

Ayn Rand was twelve when the Bolsheviks took power in her home city; they seized her father's pharmacy, and the family fled to Crimea.

Who served as first deputy mayor of St. Petersburg under Anatoly Sobchak?

Vladimir Putin had studied law under Sobchak; back from KGB service in East Germany, he joined his old teacher's team and left for a Kremlin post in 1996.

What causes most of the floods that have swamped St. Petersburg?

Storm surges from the Baltic: westerly gales drive a long wave up the shallow gulf and pen the river back until it spills over. The worst, in 1824, covered most of the city.

St. Petersburg's blue-domed mosque of 1913 was modelled on the Samarkand tomb of which conqueror?

Tamerlane's mausoleum, the Gur-e-Amir, was the pattern; the Emir of Bukhara bought the plot, and craftsmen from Central Asia came north to help decorate it.

The Catherine Palace stands in which town on the southern edge of St. Petersburg?

Tsarskoye Selo was the tsars' summer residence, and Russia's first railway, opened in 1837, ran there from the capital years before any line reached Moscow.

Which naval town and fortress on Kotlin Island guards the sea approach to St. Petersburg?

Kronstadt was fortified from 1704 to shield the new city from the sea; in 1921 its sailors rose against the Bolshevik government and were crushed.

Which St. Petersburg museum ship fired the blank shot said to have signalled the 1917 assault on the Winter Palace?

The Cruiser Aurora had already survived the Battle of Tsushima against Japan in 1905; during the World War II siege her guns were taken ashore to defend the city.