Quote Originally Posted by ezhikvtumane
I've definitely heard a difference in person. Maybe what I'm hearing is not an accent, per se, but rather, a slightly different manner of speaking? It seems that people from St. Pete speak with a softer pronunciation than Москвичи.

When I asked some other Russians if this was accurate, some of them agreed that there is a slight difference. Maybe you'd notice it if you spent more time in Moscow....?
It's interesting that you could hear a difference. I think it's mostly a thing of the past. I spent most of my life in SPb and I used to go to Moscow quite frequently and I don't remember noticing much difference, while at school we were taught that it is actually moscovites who speak softer. We were taught that they say дожжи instead of дожди, булошная instead of булочная, etc. I think it might have been true at some point in the past, but mass migration combined with mass media brought everything to a more or less common denominator. There are however words that are used only in SPb and not used in Moscow and vice versa. A common example is поребрик... Somewhere online there is a Moscow-Spb dictionary. It's mostly a joke, but I've met a lot of people who wouldn't know what I meant when I would say поребрик