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That St Petersburg now is among the finest towns in the world, indeed, that it even exists, is testament to the unbending will of Peter the Great and his Tsarist successors.
But St Petersburg is also a testament to ideas – of the Baroque and the Neoclassical, of enlightened progress and, above all, of the belief that Russia, having faced East for so long, must turn its face towards the West.
[Via Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time, BBC Radio 4]
