The City Formerly Known As: Difference between revisions

{{Useful Notes}}

 

St. Petersburg, Russian Federation. Formerly Leningrad. Before that, Petrograd. Before that, St. Petersburg. Before that, ''[[Sweden|Nyenskans]]''.

 

Note that several other major cities (and probably many smaller ones) have reverted to their pre-revolutionary names. Gorkij became Nizjnyj ("Lower") Novgorod and Sverdlovsk became Ekaterinburg. Volgograd, however, has not become Tsaritsyn again, and some people want to go back to Stalingrad. The only major city to retain its communist name is Kaliningrad, in the exclave of the same name. This is because the area was actually part of Germany (Königsburg) before the war, and hasn't had a Slavic name since about 800 at the latest. There is real debate about changing it back nevertheless, and it is often called "Kyonig" informally. See [[Please Select New City Name]] for particulars.

 

{{examples|Appearances of St. Petersburg / Petrograd / Leningrad / St. Petersburg in fiction include:}}

* Seen it a million times in Soviet/Russian cinema. Its representations in Russian fiction can be divided into several categories:

** Dramas about the [[Red October]] and the early years of Soviet Russia.

** [[World War II]] films, focusing on the battles around Leningrad and the 900-day siege.

** Films set in Soviet Leningrad after the war, either playing with its Second City/Cultural Capital status, or painting a [[Darker and Edgier]] picture of urban Soviet life and the countercultures that emerge as a result of it. The latter kind is more typical of [[The Eighties]].

*** By now the "Criminal Capital" image has pretty much become a [[Dead Horse Trope]], unless it was a [[Dead Unicorn Trope]] to begin with - while there was a lot of [[The Mafiya|organised crime]]-related violence in the city in the nineties, the city itself was more of a strategically important piece of "property" than a country-wide criminal control centre.

* Bond [[Rule of Cool|drives]] a [[Tank Goodness|tank]] through the place in ''[[GoldenEye (film)|GoldenEye]]''.

* ''[[Anastasia]]''

** Which mostly gets it completely wrong; for example, both the exterior and interior of the Winter Palace bear almost no resemblance to the real thing.

* ''A Dangerous Climate'', one of [[Chelsea Quinn Yarbro]]'s Saint-Germain novels

* Most of the action in ''Face of the Dark Palmira'', Vladimir Vasilyev's contribution to Sergei Lukyanenko's [[Night Watch (novel)|Night Watch]] series, takes place in St. Petersburg. The city in the novel is [[City Noir|so]] [[Mordor|Dark]] that even the [[Dark Is Not Evil|Dark-sided protagonists]] from other cities feel uneasy about going there.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Major World Cities]]

[[Category:Useful Notes/Russia]]

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