Ten years ago this week, when the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of Russia returned the historic name of St. Petersburg to Leningrad, the city's citizens did not feel universal delight. A referendum had found only 54 percent of voters in favor of the change. The still-powerful Communist Party had asked that ''there be no mockery of the name of glorious Leningrad, hero-city, warrior- and laborer-city.'' The newspaper Sovest (Conscience) demanded hysterically: ''Why rename our city? So that dead tsarism can breathe on us again?'' In reply, liberals organized a noisy demonstration under the slogan ''Lenin's name shames a great city!''

Everyone understood that at issue was not simply the city's name but an important ideological symbol. But there might have been no impetus to restore the name at all if the memory of the old, artistically and intellectually rich St. Petersburg had not been kept alive in the United States.

In 1703, when Peter the Great founded his city on the Baltic Sea and named it Sankt-Peterburg, following his admiration for things Dutch, he stressed the break he was making with the backward ways and traditions of old Russia. St. Petersburg became one of Europe's great centers of culture and ideas. The transformation to Leningrad in 1924, shortly after the death of Lenin, was supposed to demonstrate the solidity of Soviet power, even though, paradoxically, Lenin had not liked the city and had even stripped it of the status Peter had given it, restoring Moscow as the capital in 1918.

Stalin had an even greater antipathy for the city, which he saw as a center of opposition. The Great Terror was felt particularly hard in Leningrad. Subsequent Kremlin leaders held the same arm's-length view, and Leningrad, which had once had unparalleled cultural and industrial potential, became a city of regional, more than national, importance. Peter's capital slowly faded, and its old glamorous aura had to be preserved in exile.

The first influential elegaic portrait of St. Petersburg came in the early 1950's, in Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography, ''Speak, Memory.'' In a Proustian array of nostalgic details, he made the city real to his Western readers. Then, in 1962, Igor Stravinsky confessed in his book of dialogues with his amanuensis Robert Craft that St. Petersburg, which he saw as the fount of his creativity, was ''dearer to my heart than any other city in the world.''

But the greatest contributor to the late 20th century's consciousness of St. Petersburg was George Balanchine. In his neoclassicist ballets, the legend of imperial Petersburg played a substantial role. When Balanchine took his ballets to Leningrad itself in 1962, under the aegis of the State Department, the reception was revolutionary. I was there, and I remember the overwhelming impression created by the tour. Older people rejected it: ''The Americans aren't dancing; they're solving algebra problems with their feet.'' But the young saw in Balanchine's productions the heights that the Petersburg cultural avant-garde could have reached if it had not been crushed by the Soviet authorities. Leningrad's aspiring musicians, writers and dancers were inspired.

Mikhail Baryshnikov took the second Balanchine tour in Leningrad, in 1972, so much to heart that soon afterward, hoping to work under the master's direction, he defected to the West. In New York he became friendly with another recent émigré from St. Petersburg, the poet Joseph Brodsky.

Brodsky's life became an important symbol of the new Petersburg idea. Officially sentenced in Leningrad and exiled to the Arctic in 1964 for ''parasitism,'' he was released and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union. In 1987, after several years in New York, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. This triumph was, for the city's artists and intellectuals, a realization of their hidden dream -- the return of St. Petersburg's cultural glory.

Now St. Petersburg's seminal spirit has regenerated itself and taken a surprising turn: Petersburg has seen a burst of political energy. Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, who appears determined to lead Russia toward a place as a modern European power, and his closest associates are all Petersburgers. Their influence has raised the fortunes of the city as it continues to strive for a wider renaissance. More and more, St. Petersburg is now called the ''second capital.''

In Stalin's day, talk like that could have gotten you shot.

Drawing (Constantin Boym)