When tourists come to St.Petersburg they want to see St.Petersburg of Peter The Great, The Cultural Capital, The City of White Nights and Moveable Bridges.
But the history continues and the city saw many things, underwent many changes and now it is a mixture of times, places, people and it has so many images and faces.
Peter the Great founded St.Petersburg in 1703 and wanted to make it much more beautiful than other European cities.
And now what set the history of St.Petersburg apart from many other cities in the world is its Communist past. What makes this city unique and alive is the memories of places and people.
The greatest experiment in the world history - the rising of the USSR - that is what totally changed the face of our city. And it is very interesting to see how it was built and to compare two cities St.Petersburg and Leningrad.
One of people I met in St Petersburg (Vladimir) is mostly interested in the Soviet period of Russian history. Once he was fed up with the legends about Soviet Union and Cold War and decided to make his own tours.
He knows a lot about the Soviet past and hosts very unusual tours about the Revolution, and the prerequisites of it, the Soviet architecture.
One of Vladimir’s tours “Metro Palaces” is really worth visiting both for foreign tourists and for St Petersburg citizens.
Tourists get shocked when they see this huge opulent stations with a lot of decorations, gold, marble and so on. They can’t make sense for what reason they needed to spent so much time and money on such a usual transportation system.
And for us it is really surprising and interesting to look on all this from the other side, every day we use metro and every day we don’t notice and don’t think about it.
If you ask any citizen in Russia “Why your metro is so beautiful?”, I don’t think that many of us will find the answer.
But the truth is that Russian Metro is really something extraordinary. You can’t find anything like it in other countries.
The excursion goes through the stations built across the first line from Avtovo to Ploshad Vosstaniya. And after a journey you will understand why it is called Palaces for People.
The cut-glass columns at Avtovo station or the frescoes showing the residence of a Russian empress at Pushkinskaya will make you believe that the architecture of Leningrad underground reflects nothing less than the magnificence of the tsars.
May be this quote will make something clear for you:
“Our Soviet metro exerts a wholesome influence on those who use its services. The majestic architecture of the metro stations, their impeccable cleanliness, the efficient performance of the maintenance personnel and the whole atmosphere prevailing in the metro make a man stand up straight and behave himself. The passengers of our metro are proud of their country’s achievements and pay great respect to the work of the metro-builders.”
From Kliment Voroshilov’s speech on the awarding the of builders of the Leningrad metro.
You can read more on history of St.Petersburg Undeground here.
St Petersburg metro looks really gorgeous. And it is so common for citizens! Once you are here in St Petersburg try to feel how it is to live with all this beauty :-)
