Revisionism and dishonesty - Changing names won’t change past

WHEN Peter the Great decided, in the early 1700s, that Russia needed access to the Baltic Sea, he built a port city on the river Neva, on the Gulf of Finland. 

It is not surprising that the scale of his ambition was recognised when the city was named St Petersburg. Since then, the city, Russia’s second-largest and occasional capital, has had various names, each bending to the political needs of the day.

During the First World War, Russians thought Sankt Peterburg too German, so Tsar Nicholas II renamed it Petrograd, just in time for the 1914 October Revolution.