The university's alumni include Nobel Prize winners, such as Pyotr Kapitsa and Zhores Alferov, physicists and atomic weapon designers such as Yulii Khariton, Nikolay Dukhov, Abram Ioffe, Aleksandr Leipunskii, and Yakov Zeldovich, aircraft designers and aerospace engineers, such as Yulii Khariton, Oleg Antonov, Nikolai Polikarpov, and Georgy Beriev, and chess grandmasters, such as David Bronstein.

The main person promoting the creation of this university was the Finance Minister Count Sergei Witte.

Witte viewed establishing an engineering school loosely modeled by the French École Polytechnique as an important step towards the industrialization of Russia.

Unlike the French École Polytechnique, the Saint Petersburg Polytechnic Institute was always considered to be a civilian establishment.

[citation needed] The main campus was built on the rural lands beyond the dacha settlement Lesnoye.

The location was intended to provide some separation between the campus and the capital city of Saint Petersburg.

Some students, like future Soviet military commander Leonid Govorov studied at the institute for one month.

Professor of the Institute, A. V. Wulf was the chairman of the group working on the electrification of the Northern Region of RSFSR.

[citation needed] In autumn 1920, due to the cold weather and the absence of heating some lectures were only attended by one or two students.

At that difficult time Nikolay Semyonov and Pyotr Kapitsa discovered a way to measure the magnetic field of an atomic nucleus.

In another laboratory another student of the Institute, Léon Theremin worked on the development of electronic musical instruments.

[citation needed] In 1930, Sovnarkom decided to create a network of highly specialized Engineering schools.

With the onset of the eastern front of World War II, 3500 students went to the army and hundreds were involved in constructing fortifications to the university itself.

The Polytechnic Institute was the only school in the besieged city that had the authority to evaluate the Kandidat (Ph.D) and Doctor of Science dissertations.

Finally, in 2015, the institute took its current name Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University.

[7] During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the University issued a public statement strongly supporting Russian actions, calling the assault a "denazification operation" and accusing Ukrainian leadership of endangering the security and existence of Russia and "all of humanity".

International students countries of origin include US, UK, France, Germany, Finland, Sweden and most of the CIS state members.

[citation needed] Proportion of student body enrolled in each department, where enrollment exceeds 10%: The campus consists of[11] Today the Polytechnic University includes 6 associated institutes outside Saint Petersburg in the cities of Pskov, Cheboksary, Cherepovets, Sosnovy Bor, Smolensk and Anadyr.