Saint Petersburg formerly known as Petrograd , then Leningrad , is a city situated on the Neva River, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. It is Russia's second-largest city after Moscow. With over 5.3 million inhabitants as of 2018, it is the fourth-most populous city in Europe,[ as well as being the northernmost city with over one million people. An important Russian port on the Baltic Sea, it has a status of a federal subject . It served as a capital of the Russian Tsardom and the subsequent Russian Empire from 1713 to 1918 . After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks moved their government to Moscow.In modern times, Saint Petersburg is considered the Northern Capital and serves as a home to some federal government bodies such as the Constitutional Court of Russia and the Heraldic Council of the President of the Russian Federation. It is also a seat for the National Library of Russia and a planned location for the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. The Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so it's also referred to as Russia's Culture Capital.

A major historical and cultural centre and an important port, St. Petersburg lies about 400 miles northwest of Moscow and only about 7° south of the Arctic Circle. St. Petersburg has played a vital role in Russian history since its founding in 1703. For two centuries it was the capital of the Russian Empire. The city is remembered as the scene of the February and October Revolutions of 1917 and for its fierce defense while besieged during World War II. Architecturally, it ranks as one of the most splendid and congenial cities of Europe. Its historic district was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1990. Saint Petersburg is home to the Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world.
 

• St Peter’s Peter & Paul Cathedral is the highest cathedral in Russia. The height of its bell tower is 122.5 meters
• 10% of the total area of St. Petersburg is covered with water. The city is located on 42 islands, has over 300 bridges
• The deepest metro in the world is in St. Petersburg.The tunnels of the St. Petersburg metro lie at a depth of about 70-80 meters
• "Blue" bridge in St. Petersburg, thrown across the river Moika, is the widest bridge in the city and one of the widest in the world. Its width is 97.3 meters
• St. Petersburg is the capital of trams. The length of the tram tracks in the city is more than 600 km. This fact is listed in the Guinness Book of Records
• St. Petersburg became the first city in Russia, where in 1837 the first Russian railway St. Petersburg - Tsarskoe Selo was opened
   

Saint Petersburg is a federal subject of Russia .The political life of Saint Petersburg is regulated by the Charter of Saint Petersburg adopted by the city legislature in 1998.The superior executive body is the Saint Petersburg City Administration, led by the city governor . Saint Petersburg has a single-chamber legislature, the Saint Petersburg Legislative Assembly, which is the city's regional parliament.According to the federal law passed in 2004, heads of federal subjects, including the governor of Saint Petersburg, were nominated by the President of Russia and approved by local legislatures. Should the legislature disapprove the nominee, the President could dissolve it. The former governor, Valentina Matviyenko, was approved according to the new system in December 2006. She was the only woman governor in the whole of Russia until her resignation on 22 August 2011. Matviyenko stood for elections as member of the Regional Council of Saint Petersburg and won comprehensively with allegations of rigging and ballot stuffing by the opposition. In 2012, following passage of a new federal law, restoring direct elections of heads of federal subjects, the city charter was again amended to provide for direct elections of governor. On 3 October 2018, Poltavchenko resigned, and Alexander Beglov was appointed acting governor.Saint Petersburg city is divided into eighteen districts. Saint Petersburg is also the unofficial but de facto administrative centre of Leningrad Oblast, and of the Northwestern Federal District.

According to the federal law passed in 2004, heads of federal subjects, including the governor of Saint Petersburg, are nominated by the President of Russia and approved by local legislatures. If the legislature disapproves the nominee, it is dissolved. The former governor, Valentina Matviyenko was approved according to the new system in December 2006; she moved to another job in Moscow and was replaced on Georgy Poltavchenko in 2011. In 2012, following passage of a new federal law,restoring direct elections of heads of federal subjects, the city charter was again amended to provide for direct elections of governor. Saint Petersburg city is currently divided into eighteen administrative divisions.

The city itself is divided into raions , and there are also a number of suburban districts that are subordinate to the St. Petersburg city government. Most rural districts in the orbit of St. Petersburg are subordinate to the provincial government of the Leningrad oblast . Although located in St. Petersburg and sharing some responsibilities and institutions with the city, the provincial government is itself a separate «subject» of the Russian Federation. As a residue of the city’s former status as capital, certain organizations still maintain their national headquarters in St. Petersburg, among them the Russian geographic, chemical, and medical societies.

Saint Petersburg is also the administrative center of Leningrad Oblast, and of the Northwestern Federal District.

Saint Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast, despite being different federal subjects, share a number of departments of federal executive agencies, such as courts of arbitration, police, FSB bureaux, postal services, drug enforcement administration, penitentiary service, federal registration service, and other federal services.

The Constitutional Court of Russia moved to Saint Petersburg from Moscow in May 2008.

Saint Petersburg is a major trade gateway, serving as the financial and industrial centre of Russia, with specializations in oil and gas trade; shipbuilding yards; aerospace industry; technology, including radio, electronics, software, and computers; machine building, heavy machinery and transport, including tanks and other military equipment; mining; instrument manufacture; ferrous and nonferrous metallurgy ; chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and medical equipment; publishing and printing; food and catering; wholesale and retail; textile and apparel industries; and many other businesses. It was also home to Lessner, one of Russia's two pioneering automobile manufacturers ; it was founded by machine tool and boiler maker G.A. Lessner in 1904, with designs by Boris Loutsky, and it survived until 1910.

St. Petersburg is second only to Moscow among Russian cities in terms of industrial output. In the late Soviet era more than half of the city’s working population was employed in factories and the building trades. Following post-Soviet deindustrialization, about one-fifth of the working population was still employed in industry, and the city attracted more industry than Moscow. The majority of the remainder of the working class was employed in the service sector. Industrial output declined throughout the 1990s but bounced back and significantly exceeded its former levels by the beginning of the 21st century, by which time St. Petersburg’s economy was growing faster than Russia’s as a whole. Saint Petersburg has three large cargo seaports: Bolshoi Port Saint Petersburg, Kronstadt, and Lomonosov. International cruise liners have been served at the passenger port at Morskoy Vokzal on the south-west of Vasilyevsky Island. In 2008 the first two berths opened at the New Passenger Port on the west of the island.

The new port is part of the city's «Marine Facade» development project and is due to have seven berths in operation by 2010. A complex system of riverports on both banks of the Neva River are interconnected with the system of seaports, thus making Saint Petersburg the main link between the Baltic Sea and the rest of Russia through the Volga-Baltic Waterway.

The Saint Petersburg Mint , founded in 1724, is one of the largest mints in the world, it mints Russian coins, medals and badges. Saint Petersburg is also home to the oldest and largest Russian foundry, Monumentskulptura, which made thousands of sculptures and statues that now grace public parks of Saint Petersburg, as well as many other cities. Monuments and bronze statues of the Tsars, as well as other important historical figures and dignitaries, and other world-famous monuments, such as the sculptures by Peter Clodt von Jürgensburg, Paolo Troubetzkoy, Mark Antokolsky, and others, were made there.

Known as Russia's «beer capital» due to the supply and quality of local water, its five large breweries account for over 30% of the country's domestic beer production. They include Europe's second largest brewery Baltika, Vena , Heineken Brewery, Stepan Razin and Tinkoff brewery .

The city's many local distilleries produce a broad range of vodka brands. The oldest one is LIVIZ . Among the youngest is Russian Standard Vodka introduced in Moscow in 1998, which opened in 2006 a new $60 million distillery in Petersburg in an area of 30,000 m2 . In 2007 this brand was exported to over 70 countries. Saint Petersburg has the second largest construction industry in Russia, including commercial, housing and road construction. In 2006 Saint Petersburg's city budget was 180 billion rubles.

The federal subject's Gross Regional Product as of 2016 was 3.7 trillion Russian rubles , ranked 2nd in Russia, after Moscowand per capita of US$13,000, ranked 12th among Russia's federal subjects, contributed mostly by wholesale and retail trade and repair services as well as processing industry and transportation and telecommunications .
 

Saint Petersburg is a major transport hub. The first Russian railway was built here in 1837, and since then the city's transport infrastructure has kept pace with the city's growth. Petersburg has an extensive system of local roads and railway services, maintains a large public transport system that includes the Saint Petersburg tram and the Saint Petersburg Metro, and is home to several riverine services that convey passengers around the city efficiently and in relative comfort.

Despite the 900-day siege during World War II, much of the city’s housing was not destroyed and is still in use. Massive postwar building programs significantly increased the housing stock, though not nearly on the scale accomplished in Moscow. As a result, while a large proportion of St. Petersburg’s residents live in more modern apartments , about one-fifth of the city’s population still live in communal apartments, a vestige of Soviet urban life . A large share of housing stock, including many communal apartments, is located in the historical area of St. Petersburg. All housing has access to central heat and is tied to the city’s sanitation and power services.

The city is connected to the rest of Russia and the wider world by several federal highways and national and international rail routes. Pulkovo Airport serves most of the air passengers departing from or arriving to the city.

Saint Petersburg has an extensive city-funded network of public transport and several hundred routes served by marshrutkas. Trams in Saint Petersburg used to be the main mean of transport; in the 1980s this was the largest tram network in the world, but many tracks were dismantled in the 2000s.

The construction of freeways such as the Saint Petersburg Ring Road, completed in 2011, and the Western High-Speed Diameter, completed in 2017, helped reduce the traffic in the city. The controversial M11, also known as the Moscow-Saint Petersburg Motorway, would connect Saint Petersburg and Moscow by a freeway and is expected to be complete before the Russia FIFA World Cup 2018.

Construction began in 2010 and the first sections of the freeway were finished in 2014 and 2015.

Saint Petersburg is an important transport corridor linking Scandinavia to Russia and Eastern Europe. The city is a node of the international European routes E18 towards Helsinki, E20 towards Tallinn, E95 towards Pskov, Kiev and Odessa and E105 towards Petrozavodsk, Murmansk and Kirkenes and towards Moscow and Kharkiv .

The average amount of time people spend commuting with public transit in Saint Petersburg, for example to and from work, on a weekday is 69 min. 19.6% of public transit riders, ride for more than 2 hours every day. The average amount of time people wait at a stop or station for public transit is 11 min, while 16.1% of riders wait for over 20 minutes on average every day. The average distance people usually ride in a single trip with public transit is 7 km, while 15.% travel for over 12 km in a single direction.

The city is also served by passenger and cargo seaports in the Neva Bay of the Gulf of Finland, Baltic Sea, the river port higher up the Neva and tens of smaller passenger stations on both banks of the Neva river. It is a terminus of both the Volga-Baltic and White Sea-Baltic waterways.

The Helsinki railway, built in 1870 and 443 kilometers long, has trains running five times a day, in a journey lasting about three and a half hours with the Allegro train.

The Moscow – Saint Petersburg Railway opened in 1851, and is 651 kilometers long; the commute to Moscow now requires from three and a half to nine hours.

In 2009 Russian Railways launched a high speed service for the Moscow–Saint Petersburg route. The new train, known as Sapsan, is a derivative of the popular Siemens Velaro train; various versions of this already operate in some European countries. It set records for the fastest train in Russia on 2 May 2009, travelling at 281 km/h and on 7 May 2009, traveling at 290 kilometers per hour .

Since 12 December 2010 Karelian Trains, a joint venture between Russian Railways and VR , has been running Alstom Pendolino operated high-speed services between Saint Petersburg's Finlyandsky and Helsinki's Central railway stations. These services are branded as «Allegro» trains. «Allegro» is known for suffering some big technical problems from time to time, which sometimes result in significant delays and even cancellation of tourists' trips

Saint Petersburg is served by Pulkovo International Airport, and also by three smaller commercial and cargo airports in the suburbs. Lappeenranta Airport, which is near Saint Petersburg but on the Finnish side of the border is also popular among Russian travellers. Pulkovo airport was opened to passengers as a small aerodrome in 1931.