I have been to many cities with old style architecture, Barcelona, Paris, Nice, Venice, Rome, Prague, Vienna, etc. St. Petersburg is by far the most beautiful city I have seen in my life. And not even ruined by migrants either. Athough it is a Russian city, Peter the Great who loved all things western named it Petersburg (Peter's city) which uses a more Germanic/western european name. In 1914, with the beginning of World War I, the city was renamed Petrograd (a more slavic take on the name) due to the war with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the Bolsheviks took power, Lenin ordered the capital be relocated to Moscow due to then Petrograd's proximity to the border. As he feared it would be potentially easy to invade (In WWII also known as The Great Patriotic War in Soviet countries, the Germans and Finnish sieged Leningrad for 900 days). When Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, it was then renamed once again, this time to Leningrad. Lenin's city - "The city of the revolution" In 1991, with the collapse of the communist regieme the city was renamed to St. Petersburg, though many people still refer to it as Leningrad, and the state or 'oblast' that St. Petersburg is in is still known as the Leningrad oblast.