Urban redevelopment in the Russian largest cities during last 30 years was driven by universal modernization trends as well as by specific “path‐dependent” changes. This study discusses the role of commercial, and specifically retail trade and services redevelopment as the major indicator of recent redevelopment trends in the periphery of Russian cities under effects of different above mentioned factors. Two most specific inner‐city post‐socialist zones–socialist time industrial and socialist time residential belts were in the focus of the GIS based research. The source of data of a number, type and location of objects of retail and services were а large‐scale field survey conducted in 1994, 1998 and 2016 and the Yellow Pages and Business Navigator reference databases. Using the example of St. Petersburg, it is shown that under the effect of the tertiary sector both of them have changed in a completely different way: turned from monofunctional to polyfunctional urban zones; lost much of their “post‐socialist” specificity and became much closer to other European cities' analogs functionally, still retaining certain morphological peculiarities though; developed different and distinct commercial specialization which did not exist there before and have changed their spatial structures. The research results were used to estimate the relative significance of the major global and “path‐dependent” factors for commercial redevelopment in the studied peripheral zones.