By the dawn of the twentieth century, the city was the fifth-largest in Europe, behind London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, and was widely viewed as representative of imperial Russia’s new military and industrial might. But with industrialization there also emerged a surging revolutionary movement, and “Red Petrograd” soon became the “cradle of the Revolution.”
UNDER THE SOVIETS
With the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Nicholas II russified the capital city’s name to Petrograd. In the early days of the war, the streets of Petrograd were filled with young men volunteering for military service. But as Russian losses mounted and the economy declined still further, Petrograd became the focus of anti-tsarist sentiment. The Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, founded in 1917 and modeled on a 1905 organization, was the most active. In March (February O.S.) 1917, workers struck and soldiers mutinied, leading to the eventual abdication of Nicholas II. A Provisional Government was in
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stalled, but constantly battled the Petrograd Soviet for control of the city. During the “July Days,” the Soviet nearly succeeded in gaining power. On November 7 (October 25, O.S.), members of Trotsky’s Red Guards stormed the Winter Palace, and the Provisional Government fled. For the next seventy-four years, the communists would control Russia.
The Soviet regime’s shift of its seat of government to Moscow in March 1918 stripped Petrograd of many of its most creative and powerful institutions and prominent individuals. The city was renamed Leningrad after the death of Lenin in 1924. Its standing was further undermined by the December 1934 assassination of Leningrad Party leader Sergei Kirov in his office at the Smolny Institute, which precipitated Josef Stalin’s mass purges. Mass graves containing the victims were still being discovered outside the city as recently as 2002.
World War II took a particularly heavy toll on Leningrad. For nine hundred days the Germans laid siege to the city, and there were anywhere from 700,000 to more than 1 million civilian deaths from attack and starvation. Although the Nazis never entered the city proper, they looted and burned many of the palaces in the environs, including Pe-terhof and the Catherine Palace.
During the post-Stalin era Leningrad was an important economic and intellectual center, though still trailing Moscow. Aside from Kirov, one of Leningrad’s best-known political leaders was the rather ironically named Grigory Romanov. As first secretary of the Leningrad Oblast Party Committee from 1970 to 1983, Romanov encouraged production and scientific associations, as well as links among such groups to innovate and implement new technologies. As a result, Leningrad achieved enviable production levels. Romanov also made use of the city’s extensive scientific establishment, linking the research and production sectors to improve production.
THE POST-SOVIET ERA
Although Romanov eschewed Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, other Leningrad leaders embraced the changes. Anatoly Sobchak was elected to the first USSR Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989 and in 1991 became the city’s first elected mayor. A major figure in Russia’s democratic movement, Sobchak oversaw a difficult transition in his city. His resistance to the hardline August 1991 putsch was critical to its defeat. Following the coup’s collapse,
Sobchak immediately renamed the city St. Petersburg. As the city’s economy suffered under the national shift to capitalism, St. Petersburg experienced a severe rise in organized crime. Sobchak was unable to eradicate corruption, and in 1996 lost his bid for reelection to Vladmir Yakovlev.
St. Petersburg is the cultural capital of Russia. Among its most famous residents were the painters Marc Chagall and Ilya Repin; the writers Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Pushkin, Anna Akhmatova, and Fyodor Dostoevsky; the composers Peter Tchaikovsky and Dmitry Shoshtakovich; and the choreographers Marius Petipa and Sergei Diaghilev. Among its many art galleries, the Hermitage, the Russian Museum, and the Stieglitz boast collections unparalleled in the world. St. Petersburg is the home of the renowned Mariinsky ballet company (known as the Kirov in Soviet times). Shostakovich named his Seventh Symphony Leningrad. Falconet’s Bronze Horseman sculpture of Peter the Great, located in Decembrist Square, was commissioned by Catherine the Great and immortalized by Pushkin in a poem of the same name. Many palaces and Orthodox churches have been restored, including the Romanovs’ Winter Palace, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and the Kazan Cathedral. On the north bank of the Neva, the Peter and Paul Fortress has a long history as both a prison and, in the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, the burial site of all the Romanov tsars from Peter I to Nicholas II.
St. Petersburg had begun to recapture some its lost splendor by 2003. UNESCO designated the city a World Heritage site. Extensive renovation, funded in part by a $31 million loan from the World Bank, took place in preparation for the city’s tercentennial celebration in May 2003. Partly contributing to the city’s renaissance was the fact that President Vladimir Putin was born in St. Petersburg. In addition to promoting the tercentennial commemoration, Putin oversaw the renovation of the Peterhof Palace into a world-class conference center. There was also talk of creating a presidential residence in St. Petersburg and even some sentiment to move the capital from Moscow. Whether or not St. Petersburg regains the political eminence of a century ago, it remains a vibrant, culturally rich European city, much as Peter envisioned. See also: ACADEMY OF ARTS; ADMIRALTY; BLOODY SUNDAY; CATHERINE II; DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT AND REBELLION; ELIZABETH; MUSEUM, HERMITAGE; PETER I; PETER AND PAUL FORTRESS; WINTER PALACE
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Glantz, David M. (2002). The Battle for Leningrad, 1941-1944. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. McAuley, Mary. (1991). Bread and Justice: State and Society in Petrograd, 1917-1922. New York: Oxford University Press. McKean, Robert B. (1990). St. Petersburg between the Revolutions, June 1907-February 1917. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ruble, Blair A. (1989). Leningrad: Shaping a Soviet City. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sablinsky, Walter. (1976). The Road to Bloody Sunday: Father Gapon and the St. Petersburg Massacre of 1905. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Salisbury, Harrison E. (1969). The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. New York: Harper amp; Row.
Carter withdrew his support after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
While the SALT agreements represent important progress in terms of quantitative arms limitation, a significant flaw was that they failed to address the issue of qualitative advancements in weapons systems-which threatened the utility of the MAD regime. This qualitative problem was addressed in the subsequent Strategic Arms Reduction Talks. See also: ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILE TREATY; ARMS CONTROL; D?TENTE; STRATEGIC ARMS REDUCTION TALKS; STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Payne, Samuel B., Jr. (1980). The Soviet Union and SALT. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wolfe, Thomas W. (1979). The SALT Experience. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger.
Coming on the heels of the 1968 nuclear Non-Pro-liferation Treaty (NPT), the two components of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT) represented a willingness by the United States and the Soviet Union to constrain an arms race that both recognized was costly and potentially destabilizing. Soviet nuclear advantage in the early 1970s concerned the United States, and the Soviets recognized that American fears would likely translate into a massive weapons program aimed at regaining nuclear superiority. Thus the Soviet Union chose to forsake short-term advantage in favor of guaranteed parity over the long term. Both sides agreed that strategic parity would significantly contribute to stability.
The chief products of SALT I were the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972, and an interim agreement which set limits on the total number of offensive missiles allowable (further addressed in SALT II). The ABM Treaty
