St. Petersburg is a major Russian port. The city was founded by tsar? [Peter the Great]? in 1703 and named after St. Peter, the apostle. It is situated in the former marshlands where river Neva drains into the Gulf of Finland. It was the national capital of Russia under the tsars. During the World War I, the name St. Petersburg was seen to be too German and it was renamed Petrograd. In 1917, the Bolshevik revolution broke out in Petrograd. The nearby German armies forced a move of the capital to Moscow, which is the capital of Russia until the present day. During Soviet rule, the city was known as Leningrad. It was besieged by the German army during World War II.
The original name--St. Petersburg--was restored after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
A famous landmark in St. Petersburg is the Hermitage? art museum, which includes the tsars' [Winter Palace]?.
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