May 2023 marks the 320th anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg.

By this significant date, a group of Lensoviet deputies (they were the highest authority in the city in 1990-1993) are attempting to publish a truthful book about how the original name was returned to Northern Palmyra in 1991 (Leningrad turned into St. Petersburg. The return of the name took place.), who and how renamed the streets, squares, embankments.

Those wishing to participate financially or organizationally, or ideologically, can contact the organizers and as a result receive this rare and scientifically verified book as a gift, which will clarify the issue of "renaming" Leningrad. And it is useful to know this for old and small residents of St. Petersburg, citizens of Russia.

Why is it useful? Some will think: what difference does it make what the town is called, as long as they pay high salaries in it, but they don’t charge too much for housing. And that's wrong! You can't live by a lie. You can tolerate a lie until the thunder breaks out over your own head. The classics of progressive literature teach us to live, starting with Leo Tolstoy and Dickens, ending with the liberal enlighteners of the 20th century, they teach us, but all in vain ...

In George Orwell's brilliant novel "1984", which reveals the essence of totalitarian power, many facets of the bureaucratic "vertical" are shown. One of these facets is painstaking work with the past. Orwell's theorem is proved by life itself: who owns the present, he shows the past in a way that is beneficial to him. Often even during the lifetime of those who know what really happened. Our Motherland has the most direct relation to the enduring value of Orwell's novel - it is not for nothing that the writers of jokes call Russia a country with an unpredictable past!

And we are not talking about just one banal juggling of facts. In the arsenal of court "historians" and "fighters for the truth" myth-making, slander, and especially beloved in Russia, as noted by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, "a figure of silence (default)". The deputies of the Lensoviet of the 21st convocation - the first and last democratic parliament of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) - over the past thirty years have become convinced that rewriting history is by no means only a plot move of novelists. All their short and bright life in politics in the period of 1990-1993 they are trying to smear, change, partially “forget”, and give good things to other “heroes of that time”. Representatives of the current government have every means for this: influential state television channels, newspapers dependent on the budget, a controlled education system, public figures zealously broadcasting the instructions of the "leadership", pages of school textbooks.

This book - Back to square one - is an attempt to break through the all-round defense of the privatizers of the past and the present. It clearly and documented the facts about the return to Leningrad of its historical name of St. Petersburg. The circulation of the first edition in 2016 was, unfortunately, small. Now we have decided to gather strength and resources and provide the schools of St. Petersburg with our book. Maybe no one will open this book in some address, in an institution, no one will read it, but somewhere there will be inquisitive people. They will compare our grades with what they see in the school textbook of recent history. There is, as they say, a difference. And when you find discrepancies, try to use your own mind to separate the wheat from the chaff. Grow up!