St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg is a port city on the Baltic Sea in the northwest of Russia, and the country’s second largest city. Named after Peter the Great, it was the capital of Imperial Russia until 1918, and in the twentieth century has been successively renamed as Petrograd in 1914, Leningrad in 1924, and St. Petersburg again in 1991. It is home to the Hermitage, a museum founded to house Catherine the Great’s collection of paintings in 1764, and the Winter Palace, the residence of the Russian Tsars until the Russian Revolution of 1917. The city’s historic center is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Parent Map

Walton

Coordinates

Latitude: 59.938758638800
Longitude: 30.314970016479

View on the COVE Master Map

Timeline of Events Associated with St. Petersburg

Date Event Manage

2 Oct 1853 to 30 Mar 1856

Crimean War

Image from Crimean WarThe Crimean War was a conflict fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the French Empire, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia. Britain enters the conflict on 28 March 1854. Image: Photograph of Cornet Henry John Wilkin, by Roger Fenton (1855). Wilkin survived the Charge of the Light Brigade. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3g09124. The image is in the public domain in the United States because its copyright has expired.

Articles

Stefanie Markovits, "On the Crimean War and the Charge of the Light Brigade"
28 Mar 1854

Britain declares war against Russia

Illustration of the Crimean War

On 28 March 1854, Britain declares war against Russia, thus entering the Crimean War. Image: Russo-British skirmish during Crimean War (anonymous plate). This image is in the public domain in the United States because its copyright has expired.

In 1854, in defense of the Turks and of British access to eastern trade routes, Britain entered into war in the Crimea. The two-year campaign represented the nation’s first major military engagement since the end of the Napoleonic wars. It thus sheds light on mid-Victorian attitudes towards national identity, offering a counter-narrative to views of the 1850s dominated by responses to the Great Exhibition of 1851. As literary and visual representations of the war reveal, reactions to this conflict were both more nuanced and more ambivalent than our preconceptions about Victorian jingoism might anticipate.

Articles

Stefanie Markovits, "On the Crimean War and the Charge of the Light Brigade"
24 Jan 1878

Governor of St. Petersburg shot

On 24 January, 1878, Vera Zasulich shot and wounded the Governor of St. Petersburg, Fyodor Trepov. Vera Zasulich was a member of the populist revolutionary group, Land and Liberty. Her unsuccessful assassination attempt and subsequent trial and acquittal were widely covered in the British press, and inspired a wave of political terrorism in Russia.

Related Articles

Anna Vaninskaya, “Russian Nihilists and the Prehistory of Spy Fiction”
1 Mar 1881

Assassination of Alexander II, Emperor of Russia

On 1 March 1881, Alexander II, Emperor of Russia was assassinated. The assassination of the reforming Tsar Alexander II by a People’s Will terrorist propelled the Russian Nihilist theme to literary prominence in Britain.

Related Articles

Anna Vaninskaya, “Russian Nihilists and the Prehistory of Spy Fiction”