Russian Language School St.Petersburg, Russia

The beauty of St. Petersburg lies in the unique harmony of its architecture - baroque, classicist, eclectic and art nouveau, all enhanced magnificently by the ever-present water. No other city in the world possesses an intact historical city centre on the scale of St. Petersburg. And no city struggles more to hold on to its priceless inheritance.

The Language School St. Petersburg Our Russian language school in St.Petersburg is situated in the historical city centre, close to the wellknown Nevsky Prospekt and about 300 metres away from the nearest metro station (Ligovsky Prospect) in a central yet quiet neighbourhood. The language school occupies the top floor (4th floor, no elevator) of a 19th century building. We operate 15 classrooms (11 suitable for groups, 4 for minigroups or individuals) all year round. Facilities also include a self-access centre (library, DVDs, CD-ROM course material etc.), our cafeteria, internet workstations (free of charge) and a wireless zone for notebook users (free of charge). The Russian school also features a booking desk for excursions, theatre tickets and onward travel.

St. Petersburg - The city of the Tsars The young and energetic Tsar Peter I found Moscow old-fashioned, backward and constricting. He wanted to open “a window to Europe”, but for this needed a site with access to the sea. In the spring of 1703, he wrested the Neva Delta from the Swedes and immediately laid the foundations of a fortress. The area was virtually unpopulated, thick with forests and marshland and a thoroughly unsuitable place to establish a city. But the tsar had a vision. He would not only build a military base, naval construction site and trading centre, but a glittering Russian capital. Armies of workers suffered in the pursuit of the tsar’s dream, laid low in the winter by bitter cold and in the summer by epidemics and mosquito plagues.

Yet against all the odds, St. Petersburg claimed its predestiny. In the decades that followed, it blossomed into a glittering European metropolis. Architects, artists, entrepreneurs and scientists from all over Europe flocked to the city on the Neva. Its heyday was the 19th century, but at the turn of the 20th century, it enjoyed another cultural boom. This “Silver Period“ was to be the last peak before gloomy and unsettled times.

In 1905, the Russian Empire lost the Russo- Japanese War, a humiliation that unleashed the simmering dissatisfaction in the country. The capital city on the Neva was shaken by three revolutions. The last, the October Revolution of the Bolsheviks in 1917, changed not only the history of the city but of the whole world.

The new Soviet government under Lenin moved to Moscow in March 1918. St. Petersburg ceased to be the capital and entered a twilight period of forced isolation and provinciality that lasted decades. The Stalinist terror of the 1920s and 1930s hit the city of the tsars particularly hard. But the most horrific event in Petersburg’s history was the German siege in the Second World War. Hitler’s declared aim was the total destruction of the city, renamed Leningrad after Lenin’s death. The blockade lasted almost 900 days from September 1941 to January 1944 and claimed the lives of more than one million people.

Leningrad triumphed and survived, and in the 1950s, a huge influx of workers arrived from all over the country. But until the late 1980s, the city’s identity was subsumed by socialistic dreariness. Then a fresh wind blew through the window to the Baltic Sea, boarded up for many years, and in the early 1990s, the city regained its original name. St. Petersburg today is a city in search of its identity, with a host of inherited problems but on the brink of an exciting future.

Almost 5 million people live within the city boundaries today. Built on 42 islands of the Neva delta and counting more than 500 bridges and countless canals, the city is also called "the Venice of the North".