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50 free St. Petersburg trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
St. Petersburg was willed into existence on a Baltic swamp in 1703 by a tsar who wanted a window to Europe, and it spent two centuries as the capital of the Russian Empire before the Bolsheviks took the government back to Moscow. Along the way it changed its name three times, survived the most lethal siege in modern history, and kept a skyline of Baroque palaces that newer capitals bulldozed. These 50 questions run from the easy landmarks everyone photographs (the Hermitage, Nevsky Prospekt, the Bronze Horseman) to the details that separate tourists from locals: which Swedish fort Peter captured first, who conducted the Seventh Symphony inside the blockade, which bridge was the first to cross the Neva without being drawn, and why the surrounding oblast is still called Leningrad. There are questions on the city's writers and composers, on Zenit and SKA, on the noon cannon and the drawbridges, and on the Lakhta Center that now towers over the Gulf of Finland. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even on a miss. Play solo, or print it for a Russia-themed quiz night alongside our Moscow set.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On which river does St. Petersburg stand?
The Neva
The city sits at the head of the Gulf of Finland, where the Neva empties into the Baltic.
Q 02Which ruler founded the city in 1703?
Peter the Great
He laid the first fortress on Hare Island on 27 May 1703, on the site of a captured Swedish fort.
Q 03After which apostle was the city named?
Saint Peter
The founder's name day falls on 29 June, when the Orthodox Church remembers Peter and Paul together.
Q 04What was the city called from 1914 to 1924?
Petrograd
Nicholas II dropped the German-sounding Sankt and Burg a month into the First World War.
Q 05What name did the city carry from 1924 until 1991?
Leningrad
The renaming came five days after Lenin's death; the oblast around the city still bears the name.
Q 06In which year did a referendum restore the name Saint Petersburg?
1991
The vote was held on 12 June 1991 alongside Russia's first presidential election; 55% chose the old name.
Q 07What are the summer weeks called when the sky never fully darkens?
White nights
At about 60° north, the city goes without true night from mid-May to late July.
Q 08How many days did the German siege of the city last in World War II?
872
It ran from 8 September 1941 to 27 January 1944 and killed more than a million civilians, mostly by starvation.
Q 09Siege supplies reached the city over the ice of which lake?
Ladoga
The route was known as the Road of Life and only worked once the lake froze.
Q 10Who moved the Soviet government from the city to Moscow in March 1918?
Lenin
The move kept the government away from the state border after German forces had threatened the city.
Q 11Which museum occupies the former imperial residence on the Palace Embankment?
The Hermitage
It is one of the largest art museums in the world and includes the Baroque Winter Palace.
Q 12The storming of the Winter Palace in 1917 is known as which event?
October Revolution
By the modern calendar it happened on 7 November; Russia still used the old style in 1917.
Q 13Which skyscraper, completed in 2019, is the tallest in Europe?
Lakhta Center
It was moved out to Lakhta after protests that the original site opposite Smolny Cathedral would wreck the skyline.
Q 21Which war does the great column on Palace Square commemorate?
Patriotic War of 1812
The Narva Triumphal Arch marks the same Russian victory over Napoleonic France.
Q 22What was the first permanent bridge across the Neva, opened in 1850?
Annunciation
Until then only pontoon bridges were permitted across the river.
Q 23Which 1714 collection of curiosities is sometimes called Russia's first museum?
Kunstkamera
It grew into today's Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography.
Who founded the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1862?
Q 14On which island did Peter lay down the Peter and Paul Fortress?
Zayachy
The name means Hare Island; the fortress became the city's first brick and stone building.
Q 15What is the name of the city's main avenue?
Nevsky Prospekt
It starts at the Admiralty and runs east past Palace Square to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.
Q 16The Bronze Horseman statue stands on which square?
Senate
The 18th-century equestrian monument to the founder is one of the city's best-known symbols.
Q 17The 1825 Decembrist revolt was directed against which new tsar?
Nicholas I
The uprising came a day after he took the throne and was crushed on Senate Square.
Q 18Which tsar's 1881 murder is marked by the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood?
Alexander II
He was the third Russian emperor killed in the city, after Peter III in 1762 and Paul I in 1801.
Q 19Which Italian architect designed the Winter Palace?
Bartolomeo Rastrelli
His style is called Elizabethan Baroque, the peak of the city's first sixty years of building.
Q 20Who designed Saint Isaac's Cathedral and the column on Palace Square?
Auguste de Montferrand
The column went up in 1834 to mark the victory over Napoleon; the cathedral is the largest in the city.
Anton Rubinstein
Tchaikovsky was among its alumni; Rimsky-Korsakov taught there from 1871 to 1905.
Q 25Which Shostakovich symphony is dedicated to the city and nicknamed for it?
The Seventh
He wrote it while in the city during the siege; it was premiered in Samara in March 1942.
Q 26Who conducted the Shostakovich premiere inside the besieged city in 1942?
Karl Eliasberg
In 1992 the 14 surviving players of that performance played it again in the same hall.
Q 27By what name was the Mariinsky Theatre known in the Soviet era?
Kirov
Nijinsky, Pavlova, Nureyev and Baryshnikov all danced as principals of its ballet.
Q 28Which football club is the city's main team?
Zenit
The club took six straight Russian Premier League titles from 2018–19 to 2024–25.
Q 29Which European trophy did Zenit lift in 2007–08?
UEFA Cup
They followed it by beating Manchester United in the 2008 UEFA Super Cup, with Andrey Arshavin the local hero.
Q 30Which KHL hockey club plays its home games in the city?
SKA
The club has won the Gagarin Cup twice and routinely tops the league in attendance.