St Petersburg Hotel

Hotel St. Petersburg is located in… guess where? Saint Petersburg!!! You guessed it. During the Soviet period, when the city was named Leningrad, the hotel was called Hotel Leningrad. Like the hotel Moscow (written about in my very interesting article above), the St. Petersburg hotel was one of the Intourist St. Petersburg hotels. The hotel Saint Petersburg is a quite large hotel consisting of 410 rooms. It used to have more, but there was a fire in hotel St Petersburg in the early 1990’s and that helped the hotel get rid of a few rooms. St. Petersburg hotel is a typical, Soviet block type of hotel with nothing particularly distinguishing about it except that it has some of the best views in Saint Petersburg.

The St Petersburg hotel looks out on the battleship Aurora (famous for threatening the Winter Palace with its guns during the 2nd 1917 revolution when the Bolshevik’s seized power). The real drawback to this and a few other St. Petersburg hotels is that it is not so close to a metro station - you have to walk on some side streets behind the hotel to get to the Ploshad Lenina metro station. Also, sometimes they turn the hot water off in the summer during the water maintenance period.

I haven’t had too much contact with the hotel St Petersburg. I used to go there to send faxes and make phone calls when I had exported voltage regulators in the mid 1990’s. I would sneak by the St. Petersburg hotels security guards – those scary Russian fellows with the short hair and big bellies and get to the business center and use the phone.