Saint Petersburg: Sacrifice and Redemption in the City That Defied Hitler

by Sinclair McKay

ISBN: 9780241741313

Published: 2025-03-27

'One of my favourite historians' Dan Snow 'Richly-layered and packed with insight, this riveting account of terrible events tells us as much about the present as it does the past' Patrick Bishop, author of Paris '44. 'McKay's magisterial history of Peter the Great's monumental gift to Russia will become a classic' Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana Built by slave labour in the early years of the eighteenth century, Saint Petersburg was Peter the Great's so-called 'window on to Europe', a city that would outdo all of Europe in its splendour. But a window works both ways, and as bestselling historian Sinclair McKay writes, St Petersburg has always been a city that has drawn Westerners who wanted to see into Russia. It is also a city where much has happened. It was St Petersburg until 1917, Petrograd after the revolution, Leningrad after Lenin's death in 1924, and St Petersburg once again from 1991. This biography of a city stretches from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, who was...