Abstract
One of the most momentous in the wave of proposals to change place names brought about by the perestroika and the consecutive political changes in the Soviet Union was the proposal to change the name of Leningrad. After a heated discussion and a referendum the city got its old name Sankt-Peterburg back in September 1991. The other alternatives were Leningrad of 1924 and the Russifled name Petrograd of 1914. The writer Alexander Solshenitsyn wrote a letter to the city soviet arguing that the name should be Svyato-Petrograd (Holy-Petrograd) a Russian name emphasising that the city got its name after the apostle Peter, not after its founder.
For there is something distinctly foreign and alienating in the atmosphere of the city: its European-looking buildings, perhaps the location itself, in the delta of that northern river which flows into the hostile open sea. In other worlds, on the edge of so familiar a world.
Russia is a very continental country, its land mass constitutes one-sixth of the world’s firmament. The idea of building a city on the edge of the land, and furthermore to proclaiming it the capital of the nation, was regarded by Peter I’s contemporaries as illconceived to say the least. The womb-warm, and traditional to the point of idiosyncracy, claustrophobic world of Russia proper was shivering badly under the cold searching Baltic wind.
Joseph Brodsky, ‘A Guide to a Renamed City’ (1979)
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Notes
A. Toynbee, Cities on the Move (London, 1970) p. 142; F. Braudel, Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme (XVe–XVIIIe siècle) I (Paris, 1967) p. 410.
J. Bradley, ‘The Writer and the City in Late Imperial Russia’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 64 (1986) p. 332; M. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1983) pp. 179, 192, 256.
The expression ‘window to the West’ was first used by Count Francesco Algarotti in 1739 in Viaggi di Russia (Livorno, 1784) p. 67; D. Geyer, ‘Peter und St. Petersburg’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (1962) pp. 181–200.
J. H. Bater, St Petersburg: Industrialization and Change, Studies in Urban History, 4 (London, 1976); W. H. Parker, An Historical Geography of Russia (London, 1968) pp. 124–5, 180–2.
Parker, op. cit., pp. 127, 194–5, 259, 309–10; G. Rozman, Urban Networks in Russia 1750–1800 and Premodern Periodization (Princeton, N.J., 1976) pp. 185–6, 242–3; M. Engman, St Petersburg och Finland. Migration och influens, Bidrag till kännedom av Finlands natur och folk 130 (Helsingfors, 1983) pp. 98–101.
Engman, St Petersburg och Finland. Migration och influens, Bidrag till kännedom av Finlands natur och folk 130 (Helsingfors, 1983) op. cit., pp. 111–61, 388–98.
Bater, op. cit., passim; R. E. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St Petersburg 1855–1870 (Stanford, Cal., 1971); O. Crisp, ‘Labour and Industrialization in Russia’, The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, VII:2 (Cambridge, 1978) pp. 308–415.
Bater, op. cit., pp. 391–2.
G. E. Kochin, ‘Naselenie Peterburga do 60-kh godov XVIII v.’, in M. P. Vyatkin (ed.), Ocherki istorii Leningrada, vol. I (Moskva-Leningrad, 1955) pp. 101–3; K. A. Pazhitnov, Problema remeslennykh tsekhov v zakonodatel’stve russkogo absolyutizsma (Moskva, 1952) p. 48; A. I. Kopanev, ‘Remeslenniki Peterburga pervoi poloviny XIX veka’, Remeslo i manufaktura v Rossii, Finlyandii, Pribaltike. Materialy II sovetsko-finskogo simposiuma po sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi istorii 13–14 dekbrya 1972 g. (Leningrad, 1975) pp. 78–89; P. van Haven, Reise udi Rusland. Paa nye oplagt med mange tillaeg formeret (Soroe, 1757) p. 164.
H. Storch, Gemähide aus St Petersburg, vol. II (Riga, 1794) pp. 480–1.
Storch, op. cit., pp. 485, 490–1; N. V. Jukhneva, Etnicheskii sostav i etnosotsial’naya struktura naselenia Peterburga. Vtoraya polovina XIX veka — nachalo XX veka. Statistitseskii analiz (Leningrad, 1984) pp. 27–8, 48. F. B. Kaiser and B. Stasiewski (eds), Deutscher Influss auf Bildung und Wissenschaft im östlichen Europa (Cologne, 1984) passim.
Storch, op. cit., pp. 499, 501; J. G. Georgi, Versuch einer Beschreibung der Russisch Kayserlichen Residenzstadt St Petersburg und der Merkwürdigkeiten der Gegend (St Petersburg, 1790) pp. 132, 175; P. v. Haven, Nye of forbedrede efterraetninger om det russiske rige, vol. I (Copenhagen, 1747) p. 152.
Storch, op. cit., p. 497; Georgi, op. cit., p. 133.
Storch, op. cit., pp. 510–2; Engman, op. cit., passim.; M. Engman, ‘Finnar och svenskar i St Petersburg’, in S. Carlsson & N. Å. Nilsson (eds), Sverige och Petersburg, Kungl. Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, Konferenser 20 (Stockholm, 1989) pp. 59–88; M. Engman, ‘The Finns in St. Petersburg’, in M. Engman et al. (eds), Ethnic Identity in Urban Europe: Governments and Non-dominant Ethnic Groups in Europe, 1850–1940, vol. VIII (forthcoming).
Jukhneva, op. cit., pp. 30–8, 43–7; R. Pullat, Peterbuuri eestlased. Ajaloolis-demograafiline käsitlus XVIII sajandi algusest kuni 1917. aastani (Tallinn, 1981) passim.
J. Brodsky, ‘A Guide to a Renamed City’. For the immediate post-revolutionary years, see M. McAuley, Bread and Justice: State and Society in Petrograd, 1917–1922 (Oxford, 1991).
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© 1993 Theo Barker and Anthony Sutcliffe
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Engman, M. (1993). ‘An Imperial Amsterdam’? The St Petersburg Age in Northern Europe. In: Barker, T., Sutcliffe, A. (eds) Megalopolis: The Giant City in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23051-8_6
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