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In-Depth Information
the capital of Soviet Russia. The inhospitable
region on which St. Petersburg was founded was
controlled by Sweden in the late 16th century.
In the early stages of the Great Northern War,
the Russian armies captured the delta of the
Neva River, which Peter chose as the site of his
future capital. The first construction took place
on Zavachy Island, the site of the
PETER AND PAUL
FORTRESS
, which was designed to defend the city
from naval attack. Human losses to hunger and
the cold were enormous in the first years of the
city's construction, but in the remainder of the
18th century and first half of the 19th century,
St. Petersburg gained the architectural gems that
have earned its reputation as one of the most
beautiful cities in the world. In the late 19th cen-
tury, St. Petersburg became an industrial city and
by 1900 counted more than 100 metal plants.
Along with the industries and factories came a
large working class that was receptive to the rad-
ical message of socialist agitators and revolution-
aries. The
BLOODY SUNDAY
massacre of unarmed
workers at the gates of the Winter Palace in Jan-
uary 1905 triggered the nationwide 1905 Revo-
lution that almost brought the downfall of the
government of
NICHOLAS II
. Twelve years later,
the city, known as Petrograd since the outbreak
of World War I in an effort to remove the Ger-
man associations of its original name, was the
site of the demonstrations of February 1917 that
did lead this time to the collapse of the Russian
monarchy. During the rest of 1917, events in
Petrograd drove the engine of revolutionary
change, culminating in the
OCTOBER REVOLUTION
that brought the Bolsheviks to power.
The Soviet period was not kind to St. Peters-
burg. In March 1918 the Bolsheviks, feeling the
pressure of advancing German forces, transferred
the capital to Moscow. As hunger took root in
urban Russia, the city's prewar population of 2.2
million dropped to about 600,000 in 1920. In
1924 the city's name was changed again, this
time to Leningrad, in honor of Vladimir
LENIN
.
Following the assassination of the city's Commu-
nist Party leader, Sergei Kirov, Joseph
STALIN
's
government launched a campaign of mass arrests
that particularly affected Leningrad's residents.
Leningrad was only emerging from the terror of
the Great Purge of 1936-38 when it found itself
under siege by the Germans, who had invaded
the Soviet Union in June 1941. From September
1941 to January 1944, a period of 900 days, the
city resisted heroically, refusing to surrender
despite continued bombings, starvation, and dis-
ease (see
LENINGRAD
,
SIEGE OF
). Through a tenu-
ous link across the frozen waters of Lake Ladoga,
the city was occasionally supplied, but by the
time the siege was lifted, more than 1 million
residents had lost their lives and almost 10,000
buildings had been destroyed. The postwar
period witnessed the gradual reconstruction of
Leningrad, and the city's population recovered,
growing from 2.3 million in 1945 to 5 million in
1989. In the final years of Soviet rule, Leningrad
emerged along with Moscow as one of the strong-
holds of reformist sentiment. A few months
before the fall of the Communist government on
October 1, 1991, amid strong opinions on both
sides, the residents of Leningrad voted in a city-
wide referendum to rename their city St. Peters-
burg. In 2003, in great part due to the patronage
of President Vladimir
PUTIN
, a native of the city,
the major landmarks and buildings of St. Peters-
burg were renovated and beautified at great cost,
as the city celebrated its tercentenary with great
pomp.
Sakharov, Andrei Dmitrievich
(1921-1989)
physicist and political activist
Considered the father of the Soviet Union's
hydrogen bomb, from the 1960s until his death
Andrei Sakharov became the country's most
famous human rights advocate, for which he
was awarded the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize.
Sakharov was born in Moscow, the son of a high
school teacher. He graduated with a degree in
physics from Moscow State University in 1942
but was evacuated to Central Asia along with his
department, where he worked in a weapons
plant until the end of World War II. Back in
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