Which city was Russia's capital for 200 years before Moscow?

St Petersburg, from 1712 until 1918. Peter the Great built it from nothing on marshland he had just taken from Sweden, expressly to face Europe - a deliberate rejection of inward-looking Moscow. He conscripted tens of thousands of labourers, and the death toll from disease and exhaustion is high enough that the city is sometimes called the one built on bones.

It was designed rather than grown, with European architects, straight avenues, canals and a rule that stone construction was banned everywhere else in Russia so the masons would have to come. Peter also made his nobles move there, which they resented enormously - it was cold, wet, flood-prone and hundreds of miles from their estates.

The name has moved with the politics: Petersburg, then Petrograd in 1914 when the original sounded too German, then Leningrad in 1924, then back to St Petersburg by referendum in 1991. The Bolsheviks moved the capital back to Moscow in 1918 because Petrograd was too exposed to attack. The city then endured a siege of nearly 900 days in the Second World War in which somewhere around a million civilians died, mostly of starvation.