St Petersburg

This city, in its successive incarnations -St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad and, once again, St Petersburg -has always been a place of perpetual contradiction. Risen from the freezing mists and flooded marshland of the River Neva on the western edge of Russia in 1703, it was a new capital in and old country,a window on to Europe and the Enlightenment. yet, for all its glittering palaces and enchanting gardens, it has been a hotbed for war and revolution; a place of siege and starvation, and the crucible for Lenin and Stalin's power-hungry brutality.