MOSCOW -- To be a namesake of a celebrity is a curse. A person who bears the same name as a baseball star or a TV anchorman invariably finds himself a target of countless unkind comments that demean his intellect, looks and savings account, and even make fun of the car he drives. No matter how hard he tries to distance himself from the famous double, friends and colleagues gleefully keep juxtaposing the two, driving the less prominent twin absolutely nuts.
So you might imagine how tough it is for a city, rather than a person, to find itself in such a spot. An American city in Florida, St. Petersburg, 8,000 km and two centuries west of its distinguished Russian counterpart, has been struggling with such attitudes for more than a century.
In 1888, during the days of the American industrial boom, an immigrant entrepreneur named Peter Demens -- remembered in local lore as a "noble Russian aristocrat" -- brought a railway to the western shores of the muddy Tampa lagoon and christened the settlement that resulted from his purposeful effort, St. Petersburg. The choice spoke not only of Demens' sentimentality and nostalgia, as the original St. Petersburg was his birthplace, but also of his vanity. The noble Russian aristocrat -- arrogantly mimicked another Peter, the legendary Czar Peter the Great, who had founded another city in another swampland.