PETROGRAD: THE CITY AND ITS INDUSTRY

Petrograd was a city of sharp contrasts. It was the capital of the Russian Empire, yet closer culturally to Western Europe than to the rest of Russia. It was at once a city of elegant grandeur, lauded by Pushkin, and a city of eerie squalor, abhorred by Dostoevsky. Petrograd was both symbol of tsarist power and of popular revolt. Here the Imperial Court headed an army of 70,000 civil servants; here in 1905 the first Soviet had headed a general strike. Along the avenues and canals of the city centre stood palaces, splendid emporia, banks and company offices. Across the river stood bleak tenements and teeming factories. Not a stone's throw from the University and the Academy of Sciences thousands of people lived in appalling ignorance and misery. Petrograd was home to rich and poor, to a thriving revolutionary underground and to the Holy Synod, to the liberal opposition and to the Black Hundreds. Here in February 1917 a revolution erupted which was to have world-shattering reverberations.

In 1917 Petrograd had a population of 2.4 million, making it the fifth largest city in Europe. The Russian Empire had about 182 million inhabitants, less than a fifth of whom lived in towns. Petrograd was by far the largest city in the Empire; between 1897 and 1914 its population had grown from 1.26 million to 2.21 million – a very high rate of growth, compared to the average for the country as a whole. This growth was largely due to the immigration of peasants from the countryside.