Northwest (Novgorod & St Petersburg)

The window, and the republic that preceded it. Long before St Petersburg, this region's centre was Novgorod, a merchant city that traded with the Hanseatic League, controlled an enormous northern hinterland of furs, and governed itself through an assembly that hired and dismissed its princes - the nearest thing medieval Russia produced to a city republic. Its independence ended in 1478 when Ivan III annexed it and deported its leading families, and Ivan IV's sack of the city in 1570 finished the job; the alternative political tradition it represented is one of the standing what-ifs of Russian history. Peter the Great founded St Petersburg on captured Swedish marshland in 1703 and moved the capital there in 1712, explicitly to face Europe rather than the interior. For two centuries the region was the empire's government, navy, court and intelligentsia, and the place where nearly every Russian political rupture began - the Decembrists in 1825, Bloody Sunday in 1905, the February and October revolutions in 1917. The capital went back to Moscow in 1918, and the city has been the country's second place ever since. Its defining twentieth century event was the siege of 1941 to 1944, which killed around a million civilians, mostly of starvation, over nearly nine hundred days. The region's outlook remains the one Peter built it for: seaward, westward, and slightly at odds with the capital. Novgorod's birchbark letters are the best surviving record of ordinary medieval literacy in Europe. The city was never sacked by the Mongols. St Petersburg was renamed twice, to Petrograd in 1914 and Leningrad in 1924, and back in 1991. It remains Russia's chief Baltic port.

• Existed: 862 CE – present
• Type: Entity