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French philosophers like Diderot consorted with Catherine the Great, while Russian explorers established outposts in California. The Romanov potentates resided for most of the next two centuries in the Winter Palace, the green-white-and-gold testament to their Western aspirations. His city was laid out and built by Italian and French architects, a city too mannered and rectilineal for Russia, a city that announced to Europe that Russia had finally emerged into resplendent modernity. He was educated during youthful travels through Western Europe, and loathed the Slavic, ligneous chaos of Moscow. Peter the Great founded Sankt Peterburg as a "window into Europe" in 1703. There are tourists from Helsinki (though not from Omaha), snapping pictures in the Hermitage while fierce, matronly docents hiss whenever someone gets too close to a Matisse or a Gauguin.īut underneath, it is all Petrograd, not Petersburg. Oh, sure, there are Western boutiques along Nevsky Prospekt, the main thoroughfare that is like a dusty version of the Champs-Élysées. Petersburg as Russia's most avant-garde city resides only in the amber of the past. And while the original, European name has been returned, the celebration of European ideals that once marked St. Instead, the Slavification was the product of shifting national feeling, an insularity that continues to radiate from Russia today. Nobody had conquered the city (nobody ever has). The name-changing began a century ago today, when on September 1, 1914, St. The plight of its name, in many ways, encapsulates Russia's tortured relationship with the West, a relationship as unsettled in our time as it has ever been. Petersburg, which has had not two appellations but three, having changed its name twice, only to return many decades later to the original one, which it presently occupies like an old overcoat that no longer quite fits. Paris will always be Paris.Īnd then there is St. The greater the city, the more secure its name. And yes, Hot Springs, New Mexico, became Truth or Consequences in 1950. Bombay became Mumbai Saigon turned into Ho Chi Minh City. Constantinople became Istanbul some time after the Ottomans claimed the city in 1453. To keep the old name would have been like asking a hotel not to change the bedsheets from the room's previous occupant. It is true, as the old song avers, that old New York was once New Amsterdam, but the change was precipitated by an English takeover of the Dutch colony.