The city has already had its name changed more times than a participant in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Built in 1703 by Peter the Great on a marshy shore of the Gulf of Finland, it first took a Dutch name, Sankt Peterburg. Then in 1914, in a spasm of anti-German fervor, St. Petersburg underwent Russification and became Petrograd. Leningrad followed in 1924, after the death of the revolutionary leader.
The city suffered more than an identity crisis. Once the capital of the Russian empire - and host to Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov - the city became the birthplace of the 1917 Revolution, when the Bolsheviks stormed the czar’s Winter Palace. It endured 872 days of relentless artillery and air bombardment by the Nazis in World War II and was the scene of purges in 1948 during which thousands of party members were executed or exiled.
Intended by Peter to serve as Russia’s window on the West, the city quickly became the center of the czar’s effort to modernize the Russian state. It spawned a bureaucratic system that touched everything from civil service to the military and the church. That legacy lives on: last week’s vote on the name change isn’t binding; it must be approved by Parliament, which may balk at dishonoring Lenin. Even some progressives find the debate a distraction. “Our political life is too emotional,” says Anatoly Sobchak, the reformist mayor of Leningrad. “If we start wasting it on trifles like the names of cities or streets, we’re not going to get very far.”
