Catherine The Great

For those of you who have never been to St. Petersburg, let’s start with a brief physical description of the city. It is not an old city, as you may know, being built by Peter the Great (who named it after his favorite Christian saint, who just happened to have the same name as he had. What a coincidence.) at the turn of the 1700s to give Russia a port on the Baltic (a window to Europe) and a city which had a European feel. He hired European architects and planners, who designed a city

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