Saint Petersburg from wikitravel.org

Understand

by Peter the Great, the former home of the Czars and the center of Russian culture, Saint Petersburg was known as "The Venice of the North" in its heyday. Renamed Petrograd in 1914, the city was renamed again as Leningrad in 1924 after Lenin's death. Bombed, besieged and starved during World War II, during the Communist era the city took a back seat to capital Moscow.