Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg is a city in northwest Russia, on the delta of the Neva River where it flows into the Gulf of Finland. Peter the Great founded it as his window on Europe, and its historic center and palaces are listed by UNESCO.

Peter laid the first stones of the Peter and Paul Fortress on a small island of the Neva in 1703, and the court moved from Moscow to the new city in the 1710s. Architects from Italy and France built palaces, canals and granite embankments for the emperors over the next century. The city was renamed Petrograd during the First World War and Leningrad in the 1920s, and it took back the name Saint Petersburg after a vote of its people in 1991. Its bridges over the Neva are raised at night from spring to autumn to let ships pass upriver.

The Hermitage Museum, founded by Catherine the Great, fills the green and white Winter Palace and the buildings beside it with paintings by Rembrandt, Leonardo and Matisse. Saint Isaac's Cathedral has a gilded dome and columns of red granite. The Mariinsky Theatre, home of the ballet company for which Tchaikovsky wrote The Sleeping Beauty stands in the west of the old center. Nevsky Prospect, the main avenue, runs east from the Neva past the bookshops and cafes known to Pushkin and Dostoevsky.

VKontakte, the social network started by Pavel Durov, is based in the city. Power Machines makes steam and hydraulic turbines and generators for power plants at its works on the Neva. Baltika Breweries, founded in Saint Petersburg, brews beer sold across Russia under its numbered labels.