The name of this band - The Grand Astoria - comes from a famous hotel in their hometown of Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation, built in 1912 and then renovated in 1991. Those dates alone give us a snapshot of the building’s cultural significance. As one of the city’s most famous hotels, it was designed as a final expression of pre-Soviet grandeur, and would - decades later - benefit almost immediately from an huge injection of post-Soviet wealth. In between these two dates and events, one of the world’s most powerful and restrictive regimes both rose and fell.

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