St Petersburg has many monuments to its famous founder and the one on Admiralteyskaya Naberezhnaya outside what was once the Palace of Grand Duke Mikhail Mikhailovich is an interesting one as it depicts Peter the Great busy building a ship.  It also has a rather interesting backstory.  The original was given to St Petersburg in 1909 on the 200th anniversary of the Russian victory at Poltava by the city of Zaandam.  It was in Zaandam that Peter the Great lived for a period of time to learn the craft of shipbuilding and an identical statue was unveiled in the Dutch city at the same time.  The original St Petersburg statue only stood until 1918 when it was destroyed by the Bolsheviks.  However in 1996 as part of St Petersburg's 300th anniversary celebrations the Netherlands once again presented St Petersburg with the statue after making an exact copy of the one which stands in Zaandam.

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