The city Russia willed into being on a Baltic marsh — founded by Peter the Great in 1703 by forced labor, raised as a planned imperial capital of palaces and canals to face Europe, made the cradle of the 1917 revolution, and renamed Leningrad to endure a German siege that starved roughly a million people.
St Petersburg stands where almost no city should — a drowned delta on the cold Baltic edge, with no solid ground to build on — yet exactly where Peter wanted Russia to face Europe. He willed it up from the marsh in 1703, and tens of thousands of conscripted laborers died draining the marsh and driving piles into the mud, which is why Russians have long called it the city built on bones. Out of that swamp rose a planned capital of straight avenues, embankments, and baroque palaces, designed as Russia's window on the West. It would become the cradle of the revolution that toppled the tsars, and later, as Leningrad, the site of a siege that killed an estimated 800,000 to more than a million people, most of them of starvation. The city held.