Peter I founded St. Petersburg, the most European of all Russian cities

Most of the formerly wealthy families are located in and around Moscow. Peter understood that he needed a new big city where his new nobles would mingle, compete and create a new social network. At the same time, Russia desperately needs new maritime access and commercial relationships with Europe. On May 16, 1703, while peering through the sparse marshes near the mouth of the Baltic Sea that he had taken from the Swedes, Tsar Peter the Great cut two strips of grass from the island of Hare on the Neva River, placing them to create form a cross and declare: "Let there be a city here."

Built on a hospitable swampland at the cost of thousands of lives, it was shaped by the iron will of Peter, who needed a warm water port and a fortress against the Swedes. Moreover, it was his "window to Europe", a new capital where Peter's Western-inspired reforms to the military, bureaucracy, and national culture would be realized chemical. The founding of St.Petersburg in 1703 on the marshy lands of Ingria (along the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland) was an idea that achieved all of these goals at once. Moscow has not lost its importance as the 'old capital', all the tsars of Russia after Peter were officially crowned in Moscow, in the Dormition Cathedral. But St.Petersburg, as its creator actually planned it, became a European-style city and organized in a European way, helping to achieve another important Peter dynastic goal.

The city plan is based on Amsterdam, with prospects radiating straight from a center, in this case, the Admiralty shipyard, and crisscrossed by canals. Peter's man-made canal system on Vasilyevsky Island was filled up and eventually made into roads, but many of the canals south of the Neva River became the main aquatic lifeline after the city center was moved there. These canals, now bordered by rocky embankments, have earned the city the nickname: "Venice of the North".