Pulkovo Airport began in 1932 as Shosseynaya, a small airfield south of Leningrad. Its IATA code, LED, still comes from that Soviet era city name. The site suffered heavy damage in World War Two and was rebuilt in the 1950s as jet travel arrived. In 1973 it gained its landmark terminal, Pulkovo 1, designed by Aleksandr Zhuk with five glass topped, drum shaped skylights that locals nicknamed the five glasses.
A separate international terminal, Pulkovo 2, operated from an older building nearby. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the airport passed through federal and city ownership. In 2010 a consortium that included the German operator Fraport won a long lease to run it. That group built a large, centralized terminal, which opened in December 2013 and absorbed both domestic and international traffic.
The old Pulkovo 1 drums were kept and given new uses. Pulkovo became the home base of Rossiya Airlines and grew quickly, helped by visa free entry for cruise passengers and later an electronic visa scheme for the St. Petersburg region. Traffic has swung sharply since 2022, when sanctions and closed airspace cut most European links, leaving Russian domestic flights plus routes to Turkey, the Gulf, Central Asia, and China.