Siemens Velaro RUS Sapsan, Moscow, St. Petersburg

In the 1830s Alexander Pushkin translated the 'foreign' city name of 'Saint Petersburg' to the more Russian Petrograd in one of his poems. However, it was only on 31st August 1914, after the war with Germany had began, did tzar Nicholas II rename the capital to Petrograd. Since the prefix 'Saint' was omitted, this act also changed the eponym and the 'patron' of the city, from Apostle Peter to Peter the Great, its founder.
After the October Revolution, and until the city was renamed Leningrad in January 1924, the name Красный Петроград (Red Petrograd) was often used in newspapers and other prints.
In the referendum on reversing the renaming of Leningrad on June 12, 1991, renaming it to Petrograd was not an option. Because of this only 54.86% of the voters (with a turnout of 65%) supported "St.Petersburg". This change officially took effect on September 6, 1991. Meanwhile the oblast which administrative center is also in Petersburg is still named Leningradskaya.
Having passed the role of capital to Petersburg, Moscow never relinquished the title of 'capital', being called "pervoprestolnaya" ("first-throned") for 200 years. A mirroring name for Petersburg in this connotation, the "Northern Capital", is reintroduced today in the sense that several federal institutions were moved from Moscow to Petersburg recently. Solemn descriptive names like "the city of three revolutions" and "the cradle of the October revolution" used in Soviet era reminded the pivot events of national history which occurred there. For their part, poetic names of the city, like the "Venice of the North" and the "Northern Palmyra" emphasize town-planning and architectural features contrasting these parallels to the northern location of this megalopolis. Petropolis is a translation of a city name to Greek, and is also a kind of descriptive name: Πέτρ~ is a Greek root for "stone", so the "city from stone" emphasizes the material which had been forcibly made obligatory for construction from the very first years of the city.