5 Best Sights in St. Petersburg, Russia

One of the world's most magnificent plazas is a stunning ensemble of buildings and open space, a combination of several seemingly incongruous architectural styles in perfect harmony. It's where the city's imperial past has been preserved in all its glorious splendor, but it also resonates with the history of the revolution that followed. Here, the fate of the last Russian tsar was effectively sealed, on Bloody Sunday in 1905, when palace troops opened fire on peaceful demonstrators, killing scores of women and children. It was across Palace Square in October 1917 that Bolshevik revolutionaries stormed the Winter Palace and overthrew Kerensky's Provisional Government, an event that led to the birth of the Soviet Union. Almost 75 years later, during tense days, huge crowds rallied on Palace Square in support of perestroika and democracy. Today, the beautiful square is a bustling hub of tourist and market activity. Horseback and carriage rides are available for hire here. A carriage ride around the square costs about 300R per person. A 20-minute tour of the city in the direction of your choosing costs about 3,000R, for up to six people.

The site of many revolutionary speeches and armed clashes with military and police forces is generally called by its former name, Insurrection Square (the adjacent metro station is still known by that name). The busy Moscow railroad station is here, and this part of Nevsky Prospekt is lined with many kinds of shops, including new stores like Stockmann and H&M, as well as art galleries and bookstores. A stroll here is not a casual affair, since Nevsky is almost always teeming with bustling crowds of shoppers and street artists.

One of St. Petersburg's best-known landmarks, a gigantic equestrian statue of Peter the Great, dominates this square that from 1925 through 2008 was known as "Decembrists' Square," a reference to the dramatic events that unfolded here on December 14, 1825. Following the death of Tsar Alexander I (1777–1825), a group of aristocrats, some of whom were army officers, staged a rebellion on the square in an attempt to prevent the crowning of Nicholas I (1796–1855) as the new tsar, and perhaps do away with the monarchy altogether. Their coup was suppressed with much bloodshed by troops who were loyal to Nicholas, and those rebels who were not executed were banished to Siberia. Although the Decembrists, as they came to be known, did not bring significant change to Russia in their time, their attempts at liberal reform were often cited by the Soviet regime as proof of deep-rooted revolutionary fervor in Russian society.

In the center of the square is the grand statue called the Medny Vsadnik (Bronze Horseman), erected as a memorial from Catherine the Great to her predecessor, Peter the Great. The simple inscription on the base reads, "To Peter the First from Catherine the Second, 1782." Created by the French sculptor Étienne Falconet and his student Marie Collot, the statue depicts the powerful Peter, crowned with a laurel wreath, astride a rearing horse that symbolizes Russia, trampling a serpent representing the forces of evil. The enormous granite rock on which the statue is balanced comes from the Gulf of Finland. Reportedly, Peter liked to stand on it to survey his city from afar. Moving it was a Herculean effort, requiring a special barge and machines and nearly a year's work. The statue was immortalized in a poem of the same name by Alexander Pushkin, who wrote that the tsar "by whose fateful will the city was founded beside the sea, stands here aloft at the very brink of a precipice, having reared up Russia with his iron curb."

If you stand in front of the magnificent State Museum of Russian Art and turn to survey the entire square, the first building on your right, with old-fashioned lanterns adorning its doorways, is the Mikhailovsky Theatre of Opera and Ballet. Bordering the square's south side, on the east corner of ulitsa Mikhailovskaya, is the former Nobles' Club, now the Shostakovich Philharmonia, home to the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. The buildings on the square's remaining sides are former residences and school buildings.

In the center of this square in front of St. Isaac's Cathedral stands the Nicholas Statue. Unveiled in 1859, the statue of Tsar Nicholas I was commissioned by the tsar's wife and three children, whose faces are engraved (in the allegorical forms of Wisdom, Faith, Power, and Justice) on its base. It was designed, like St. Isaac's Cathedral and the Alexander Column, by Montferrand. The statue depicts Nicholas mounted on a rearing horse. Other engravings on the base describe such events of the tsar's reign as the suppression of the Decembrists' uprising and the opening ceremonies of the St. Petersburg–Moscow railway line.