LENINGRAD, the chief town of the Leningrad Area and the second largest city in the U.S.S.R. Pop. (1926) 1,592,158. Its name was originally St. Petersburg, but after the outbreak of war with Germany in 1914 this Germanic name was changed to Petro grad, grad being a form of the Russian gorod, a town. After the death of Lenin in 1924 the name was altered to Leningrad. It stands at the head of the Gulf of Finland, on the islands and shores of the mouth of the Neva river, and is the only outlet to the Baltic remaining to Russia. Although its foundation as a city dates from 1703, the Neva outlet for trade is very ancient. According to early chronicles, the way from the Varangii to the Greeks was up the Dnieper, by a portage to the river Lovot, down the Lovot to Ilmen lake, via the Volkhov to Lake Ladoga, and thence along the Neva river to the Gulf of Finland, wares being probably discharged on Vasilyevskiy or Basil island in the Neva delta. Peter the Great chose the site of the city without any consideration of physical suitability, basing his choice entirely on proximity to western Europe and outlet to the Baltic.
The islands and arms of the channels of the Neva are flat and low-lying marshes, and the delta plain is exposed to floods, especially when the westerly autumn gales force the waters of the Gulf of Finland into the Neva channel. The floods of 1824 and 1924 were particularly disastrous. The evaporation from the swamps and the northerly situation make the climate damp and severe, winter lasting from November to April and the Neva being frozen for six months. The summer nights of June and July are brief twilights reminiscent of the Arctic summer.
So many labourers lost their lives in the difficult task of build ing the city on piles in the marshes that Leningrad has the repu tation of being built on bones. The building of the harbour and the gradual development of factory industries brought an influx of industrial workers to the city, and the unfortunate condition of these workers contrasted sharply with the luxury and display of the court, so that if Moscow sums up much of the whole com plex history of Russia, Leningrad gives the clearest picture of the causes of the unrest that led to the upheaval of 1917. The
first strike occurred in 1749 amongst the textile workers, and the proletariat early had the support of the students of the uni versity, who were repeatedly subjected to political persecution, imprisonment and exile.
The Regime of Terror.--The gloomy Peter Paul fortress, where political prisoners were incarcerated and frequently died from their hardships and the Alexeyevsky Ravelin, in whose damp cells many prisoners also died, including Ivan Possoshkov, the author of "Poverty and Wealth" were perpetual reminders to the proletariat and intelligentsia of the regime of oppression. The prison of the bastion of the former has been disused since 1922. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, governors and gov erned lived side by side in Leningrad in an atmosphere of con tempt, fear and repression on one side and of hate, fear and terrorist outbreaks of bomb attacks and revolutionary attempts on the other, until the cataclysm of 1917. The wide difference in outlook between the governing classes of Russia and those of western countries is vividly expressed in the declaration of Uvarov, minister of education from 1833-49, that his aim was to construct "dams" that would hold up the flow of new ideas into Russia, and that he hoped to retard the westernization of the country by 5o years. Leningrad had been specially built by Peter the Great to admit new ideas; its educational institu tions had been largely staffed from the first by foreign teachers and its contact with the western world was close. It was thus the place where the struggle between conservatism and the effects of the impact of outside thought was sharpest.
Here the 1825 Dekabrist mutiny occurred; it witnessed the terrorist acts of the 187o to 188o Narodnaya Volya groups and the 1905 revolution received its baptism of blood near the Win ter Palace. The 1917 revolution broke out here and in July of that year there began the Bolshevist movement culminating in the October 1917 revolution. The luxury and display of wealth are gone, but poverty and unemployment are still widespread.