The city of Peter the Great

The Soviet Union (followed by its satellite countries) experienced many changes in toponymy for political reasons, for example, Tsaritsyn on the Volga became Stalingrad, the scene of an epic battle during the Second World War, but after Stalin's death, it changed to that of Volgograd. Just as the capital of Tsarist Russia, founded on the marshy estuary of the Nevà, what the Russians liked to call the Venice of the North, with its canals and cathedrals, was St. Petersburg. Founded in 1703 by Peter the Great as a window on Europe and baptised St Petersburg, German-style. During the First World War, that name sounded too Teutonic and it seemed inappropriate to the Tsar to keep a Germanic root name for capital since the country was fighting against the Austrian and German empires and therefore it was changed3 into the more Slavic one in Petrograd.

The second city, after Moscow it was the capital of Russia for a long period (from 1712 to 1918) almost without interruption. The city continued to be called Petrograd even after the October Revolution, but on Lenin's death in 1924, the second Congress of Soviets decided to rename it in Leningrad, in honour of the one who had launched the Revolution here. And it was under this name that, in the Second World War, the city was besieged by Nazi troops for 900 days. Cut off from the rest of the country and only occasionally supplied, the Leningraders held out until the counter-offensive of 1943: 700,000 of them, however, had lost their lives in the battle. With the collapse of the USSR, the city regained its original name.