Finland Station

On Lenin Square in St Petersburg stands Finland Station — one of the city's five operating railway terminals and a place closely tied to the history of the revolutionary events of the early 20th century. Suburban trains heading north and services towards Karelia depart from here.

The first station building was erected in 1870 to a design by the architect Pyotr Kupinsky, for the new railway linking the Russian capital with the Finnish lands. Construction of the 370-kilometre line took eight years; the contractor was the Vyborg merchant Pavel Yakovlev, and the interiors were decorated by the Finnish craftsmen Westling and Degener. The opening took place on 13 February 1870, with Tikhon, Bishop of Vyborg, in attendance. In 1910 the tracks were raised five metres above street level to eliminate the numerous level crossings that were hampering traffic in the Vyborg district.

The present building, in the Soviet Modernist style, was constructed between 1944 and 1960 to a design by the architects Pyotr Ashastin, Nikolai Baranov and Yakov Lukin, replacing the old structure that had faced Komsomolskaya Street. Opened in 1960, the façade facing the Neva is adorned with seventeen enormous mirrored windows and a central 16-metre clock tower topped by a thirty-metre steel spire. The original design had called for a bolder colonnade and an even taller tower, but following the campaign “against architectural excesses” the columns were replaced with pylons, and the foundations would not allow the spire to be raised any higher. In 1969 the building was further embellished with seventeen allegorical high reliefs created by graduates of the Mukhina School.

On 3 April 1917, Vladimir Ulyanov arrived at the station after returning from exile — to mark the event, a monument to Lenin by the sculptor Sergei Yevseyev was erected on the square in 1926. During the Siege of Leningrad the station remained the only one operating in the city: the famous ice road across Lake Ladoga began from here, and on 7 February 1943, after the blockade ring was breached, the first train carrying food from the mainland arrived at the platform. An historic steam locomotive is preserved on the platform — disguised as a stoker, it was on this very engine that Lenin fled the city from the Provisional Government in August 1917, returning by the same route in October; the locomotive was presented to the Soviet Union as a gift by the government of Finland.

Today Finland Station serves suburban electric trains running in the north-western and north-eastern directions, along with Lastochka trains to Karelia; until 2022 the high-speed Allegro service to Helsinki also departed from here. The building's left wing serves as an entrance to the Ploshchad Lenina metro station, and a fragment of the old station building, where Lenin gave his speech in 1917, is preserved as a protected historical monument. Roughly one and a half thousand passengers use the station every hour.

Finland Station remains not only a working transport hub but also a symbol of St Petersburg's revolutionary history — a rare example of a memorial railway station whose architecture is directly tied to a pivotal historical event. The building shapes the appearance of Lenin Square and remains a recognisable landmark of the district.