Area St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg has over 5,000,000 inha­bitants and is the second largest city in Russia. Of the cities over a million inhabitants, is the most northerly in the world. It lies in the north-western part of Russia at the mouth of the Neva River in the Gulf of Finland, part of the Baltic Sea. St. Petersburg, founded in 1703 by Peter the Great, was the capital of the Russian Empire in 1712–1917. In the times of the Soviet Union it was called Leningrad.