No. 2, 2009
Alexander Lyskin
,
Dmitry Krasovsky
CITY ON THE FABLED NEVA
The city of St. Petersburg was founded on the banks of the fabled Neva by Emperor Peter the Great on May 27, 1703. It is a city of wide streets and avenues, shady boulevards and parks, unique architectural monuments, and towering modern residential neighborhoods.
St. Petersburg is renowned for its one-of-a-kind ensembles of urban architecture, in whose creation some of the greatest architects of the 18th century took part: Ivan Starov, Bartolomeo Rastrelli, Andrey Voronikhin, Andreyan Zakharov, Giacomo Quarengi, Carlo Rossi, Vasily Stasov, Jean-Baptist Vallin de la Mothe, and many others. Among the gems of the so-called Northern Palmyra are the Fortress of Peter and Paul, the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, the Smolny Institute, the Winter Palace and Palace Square, Nevsky Avenue, the Stock Exchange Building on the Spit of Vasilyevsky Island, and Decembrist Square with its monument to Peter the Great.
It would be difficult to overestimate the city's role in the history of Russian science and culture. It was on the banks of the Neva that the magnificent works of the poets and writers Alexander Pushkin, Nikolay Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Alexander Blok, and Anna Akhmatova, the composers Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Mikhail Glinka, and the painters Karl Bryullov, Ilya Repin, and Vasily Surikov were born.
The city has undergone its share of difficult trials. During World War II and the city's 900-day siege, the Nazi invaders caused it enormous damage. More than a third of the city's residential buildings were destroyed in the course of German shelling and aerial bombardment.
The northern capital of Russia can also be called the cradle of the gas business. It was there that Russia's first unit for obtaining synthetic gas (the thermolamp) was invented by Pyotr Sobolevsky in 1811. The gasification of the Russian Empire's capital and the rest of the country dates from Sobolevsky's invention.
Today, St. Petersburg is the place where one of most important economic events for Russia and the world takes place annually: the city has become the Russian equivalent of Davos, Switzerland. Every summer, the heads of different states and governments, businessmen, and scholars gather in Russia's cultural capital to discuss and solve the world's most important economic problems.
