ports and industrial capitals. The forces of tradition and historical continuity in St Petersburg were not nearly as pronounced as they were in Moscow, where industry expanded through slow accretion. Here, industrialisation oc­curred abruptly. Furthermore, unlike the entrepreneurs of Moscow, many of whom were Russians from the merchant estate, in St Petersburg industrial­ists included a large number of foreigners. This fact was reflected in the very names of their factories: Lessner, Aivaz, Nobel and Struk, for example. And if the industrial working class in Moscow were primarily Russians from Mos­cow, Yaroslavl, Kaluga, and Nizhny Novgorod provinces, in St Petersburg the work-force was far more diverse and cosmopolitan because apart from Rus­sians it also included large proportions of Finns, Latvians, Lithuanians, Be­lorussians and Poles, among others.

St Petersburg was where Russia’s first steamship, the “Elizaveta,” was constructed (1815) and where the first railroad, linking St Petersburg with Tsarskoe Selo, was opened (1817). Here, the first trolley-bus in Russia was tested (1902). In 1906 the first taxis appeared “Fords.” Regular tram trans­portation began in 1907.

Trams travelled up and down the Nevsky Prospect until 1952. Till this day St Petersburg has the widest network of tram routes of any city in the world. More, St Petersburg was the home of Russia’s first aeronautics park, where dirigibles were tested, as well as the home of the airplane club (1908). It was also here, at the Russo-Balt factory, that Russia’s first multi-motored airplane was constructed in 1913.

In terms of education, science and technology, the city was always at the forefront. In 1828 the Technological Institute was opened. Eleven years later, in 1839, the Pulkovo Observatory was opened. The same year also marked the opening of the Petersburg—Warsaw semaphore telegraph/which at the time was the world’s longest: 1,200 kilometres. In 1845, one of the world’s oldest, the Russian Geographical Society was founded in St Petersburg. Rus­sia’s first higher education establishment for women opened in 1878. Further­more, the country’s first telephone line (47 kilometres, from St Petersburg to Gatchina) began operating in 1882; the first interurban telephone line, link­ing St Petersburg to Moscow, was installed in 1898.

The tragic side of the city is well known. Because of its spirit of indepen­dence it suffered more than any other city during the Soviet regime. Stalin hated Leningrad and the purges in the late 1930s — when many of the city’s leading cultural, intellectual and scientific lights were murdered — were most acute here. Then of course came World War II and the 900-day Blockade of Leningrad. Over 1 million people died of shelling, cold and starvation. But the city survived. It remains the only large city on the European continent in which no foreign invader has ever set foot.

7 В. М. Павлоцкий

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION. CONVERSATIONAL TOPICS

It was in our city that Mikhail Gorbachev first announced his reforms in 1985. Much has changed in the last decade. St Petersburg’s integration into the world economy is progressing at a faster pace than that of Russia as a whole. 25 percent of Russia’s exports and 2 percent of its imports pass through our city. These figures speak for themselves. And if we add that the leaders of Scandinavian countries are currently elaborating the concept of a “new Northern Europe” — which stretches from Narvik in Norway to the Polish border — St Petersburg’s role on the continent becomes even weightier.

St Petersburg is the world’s largest northerly city. It is very young, but also very beautiful, very tragic, very cultural and very heroic. Vivat St Petersburg!

3 Retell the following text. The city

I

by G. Mikes

Manhattan is, first of all, the name of a very popular cocktail. Secondly, it is the name of an island which forms the heart of New York, N. Y. The island is thirteen miles long, two miles wide and lies at the mouth of the Hudson River. East of it runs the East River, which divides the island from Long Island. Man­hattan covers 54,4 square miles and has a population of 1,889,924. It is also one of the five boroughs (or, as the Americans prefer to spell it, boros) of New York City and for the foreigner it is New York City.

“New York” was first seen by an Italian navigator, Giovanni de Verrazano, in 1524. The city, originally called New Amsterdam, was a Dutch possession and it was the New Netherlands Company which was granted a charter for exclusive trading rights. The Dutch had considerable trouble with the admin­istration of the new community, so the English with their customary readi­ness to help people in trouble, rid them of all their worries by taking the colo­ny over by force in the seventeenth century. New Amsterdam was renamed New York. Manhattan island itself was purchased by the Dutch from Indians in 1626. It seems that estate prices were pretty low at that time.