"City of Revolution" a Saint Petersburg Travel Page by emilienoelle

(I am dedicating this page to my good VT friend, grantboone, who has always wanted to go to Russia and has not yet had the chance. This one is for you, Grant!)

"If you cry "Foreward!" you must without fail make plain in what direction to go. Don't you see that if, without doing so, you call out the word to both an aristocrat and a revolutionary, they will go in directions precisely opposite?"
--Anton Chekov

Once belonging to Sweden, the land at the mouth of the Neva River was captured by Peter the Great in 1701 after a long series of battles. His plan was to establish a port with easy access to Western Europe, but so enomoured did he become with all things Western and his desire to bring Russia into the fold of the Enlightenment that he moved the country's throne there, declaring himself the Emperor of the Russian Empire.

Upon Peter's death, his wife Catherine took the throne. Catherine's passion for art and culture was perhaps the most driven of any monarch at the time. She spent millions on paintings, sculpture, artifacts, and building lavish palaces while millions of Russian peasants starved in the streets and fields. And although it was Catherine the Great's passion that preserved an untold number of the world's greatest treasures, it was this passion also that lit the spark that would eventually erupt into the Bloody Sunday Massacre and begin the Bolshevik Revolution.

Bloody Sunday, now seen as the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution, began in Palace Square on January 9, 1905. On that day troops were sent from the Winter Palace to quell what was essentially a peaceful protest, peasants seeking to make their case to the Czar for higher wages and a better standard of living. The Czar's troops killed several hundred people, firing up a movement that would eventually lead to Czar Nicolas abdicating his throne on March 1, 1917,

Today, the city of St. Petersburg, recently renamed from the Soviet "Leningrad" in the early 1990's, is still a place of tremendous flux. It is on the edge of total rebirth, while still clinging to its Soviet past. American chain restaurants line the streets, while police randomly stop and arrest people for minor or non-existent violations, often seeking bribes of Euros or US dollars. There is a sense of change in this city, the modern world forcing its way into the old, capitalism into socialism. As when Peter the Great once forced the West into the East and the Bolsheviks forced the name of "comrade" on everyone, we will have to sit back and wait to discover how the new face St. Petersburg will finally appear.