Winter Palace

15 Nov

This Russian building, like a lot of our destinations, has lived multiple lives.

Being built in the midst of Russian Imperialism, the Palace fell just as hard as the Russian monarchy, but its comeback has made it one of the most important in Russia’s political and cultural history.

Before the Palace

If you go for a wander through St. Petersburg, you will find the Winter Palace sitting on the bank of the Neva River. But that’s today, let’s wander all the way back to the early 18th century, where we see Peter the Great attempting to create the city of St. Petersburg as Russia’s new capital.

The first house he built for himself was a simple log cabin. It was a wooden house in the Dutch-style. But in 1711, a sturdier stone building replaced the wooden house. It’s believed that a Domenico Trezzini built the larger residence. Remains of this stone building actually formed the foundations of the Hermitage Theatre. They even managed to restore parts of the building, and you can visit it today.

When Peter got his wish and the capital transferred from Moscow to St. Petersburg in 1712, this winter residence for the Tsar attained the status of a major state building.

As the threat of palaces being targets for war and sieges lessened in the late 16th century, European palaces started to become less about being kept safe inside and more about showing your wealth to those that walked past. And while the Palace of Versailles was pretty much the standard when it came to Palaces, Peter didn’t really want to have to compete with the French. Nevertheless, he did want to keep up with the changes in architecture.

So Peter ordered all his nobles to build residences at his Winter Palace, legally the aristocrats also had to spend about half a year in St. Petersburg. It wasn’t really a fun time though. St. Petersburg was pretty much a ‘swamp’. The city was undeveloped, little sunlight got through and the soil wasn’t good for anything except cabbages and turnips. Understandably, the nobles weren’t that excited about spending half a year in this sordid corner of the world. But Peter pressed on, and ensured that neighbouring cities were built around the palace, through the use of slave labour that he imported from across his empire.

Unfortunately Peter died in 1725, before he got to see his Palace as the centre of European culture. Pretty much straight after his death, the nobles fled. They weren’t going to be sitting around in a stinking swamp if they didn’t have to. And the city fell to gangs of peasants.

It’s actually Peter’s niece, Empress Anna of Russia, that we have to thank for the Winter Palace’s luxury. Anna wanted the court to be popular and civilised, in line with other European courts. So she had all Peter’s furniture thrown out and brought in pieces of mahogany and ebony. Her first ball in the Palace is said to have been a gallery that was made to look exactly like an orange grove. If fresh oranges don’t say elegance in the middle of Russia, then I don’t know what does.

It was in 1731, that Empress Anna asked court architect, Francesco Bartolommeo Rastrelli to create a larger, newer palace on the site of the old one. Now, remember Rastrelli’s name, because we’re going to be hearing a lot about him. Anna’s palace, known as the Third Winter Palace, was completed a couple years later in 1735. But it didn’t last very long. 17 years was all it took before Empress Elizabeth asked Rastrelli to once again build a new palace.

Building the Palace

It took two years of planning, but eventually Elizabeth and Rastrelli agreed to a whole new design which would mean completely rebuilding the palace. Elizabeth wanted the beauty of her new palace to eclipse the other European royal palaces and so would settle for nothing but the best. Construction started in 1754, and this version of the Winter Palace is said to be Rastrelli’s masterpiece.

Despite Elizabeth wanting something new and fancy, Rastrelli did manage to incorporate the existing Third Winter Palace into the design of the larger, newer building. As many invaders of the country have realised, Russia has some severely cold winters. Despite this frozenness, Elizabeth had construction for her new palace continue year round. Even as the Seven Year’s War got under way, the Empress

viewed her palace as a matter of state prestige.

Because of the war, costs started skyrocketing and work even had to stop on several occasions because of a lack of materials and money. But even as Russia’s resources were strained to the limit, Elizabeth pushed on with her Palace. She charged a tax of 859 555 rubles on state owned taverns in an attempt to pay for the construction. But this would fall sadly short, with taxes needed to be taken from alcohol and salt as well. Altogether the Palace ended up costing 2.5 million rubles. And it’s shocking to think that the labourers who built the palace with their bare hands were only paid one ruble per month.

Elizabeth had the same unfortunate circumstances as Peter, when she died in 1761 before she could see the Palace completely finished. But when Tsar Peter III and his wife, Catherine, came to the throne, they moved straight into the main state rooms and imperial apartments in 1762.

When Catherine the Great took her husband’s place on the throne in that same year, she also removed Rastrelli as the court architect. Even though Rastrelli may not have been in charge anymore, it was his exterior designs for the palace that were completed and have remained almost unaltered to this very day. Although along the way, Catherine did have much of the Baroque interior replaced with Neoclassical designs.

With the Palace officially finished in 1762, one could see the opulence and power the Russian Imperial family had over its empire. Sitting in Palace Square, the three-story palace has a distinct Baroque style. And is said to have

enthralled all the eyewitnesses with its solemnity and elegance.

Elizabeth and Catherine

Russian Tsars have been known to be pretty brutal and just a little out of touch with how the general Russian population are feeling. And Empresses Elizabeth and Catherine were no different.

As the daughter of Peter the Great, Elizabeth Petrovna had a bright future ahead of her. When her baby cousin Ivan VI took the throne at two months old, she overthrew him after a year and made her future even brighter.

Ivan, however, didn’t really have a great time. Elizabeth put him into solitary confinement where he stayed for about 20 years. He had no contact with the outside world, not even windows. He would eventually develop a severe mental illness. After Elizabeth had died, Catherine the Great would step in and give him his freedom by having him murdered.

While Elizabeth was in power, she pretty much turned the Palace into her adult pleasure dome, with the royal court becoming known as a site of ‘gilded squalor’. And if the rumours about Catherine are true, she did exactly the same thing. But we are not here to speak of rumours, so let us charge head long into the absolute crazy that was Catherine the Great.

Catherine Alexeyevna, known as Princess Sophie Frederike Auguste of Anhalt Zerbst before her marriage, would become Catherine II when her husband Peter III became Tsar. But Catherine’s husband annoyed her, so she got rid of him. She violently deposed him in a coup, where she had gained support of the household guards. With her husband dethroned, Catherine was crowned the following year in the Assumption Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin. If you want a hilarious take on the events between the Empress and her husband around this time, check out the TV show The Great, with Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult. Claiming to be

an occasionally true story,

it’s bound to give you a chuckle.

Catherine would become Russia’s longest-reigning female ruler, much like Victoria or our very own Queen Liz. I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to see some kind of a pattern here.

Catherine, as most royals are, was well-educated and had natural talents for dealing with foreign policy which gave her a great deal of sway around the world. Even though Catherine gave off quite a tough exterior, being the head of a vast empire has to get to you. So it was she, who actually ordered a new wing of the palace be built where she could retire to be alone with her thoughts. Fittingly she named this new wing ‘the Hermitage’. Catherine wasn’t one to do something half-assed. So when it came to her art collection, she was more of a ‘more is better’ person. So she ended up building the Small and Large Hermitages and the Hermitage Theatre where her art collection could be set up correctly, and which forms the basis of today’s very popular Hermitage Museum.

In order to fill the vast space she had created, Catherine needed more art, so she sent ambassadors to Rome, France and England to collect thousands of pieces for her galleries. Supposedly, she once even managed to get hold of 225 portraits that once belonged to an old enemy, Frederick of Great Prussia, after he lost a war with Russia.

Like Elizabeth, Catherine didn’t see the big issue around the concerns of peasants. The interior of her palace was so glitzy and extravagant, that going outside of its walls, the lives of the people of Russia was almost unrecognisable.

The Palace and the Monarchy

All the Romanovs since Catherine the Great have resided at the palace at one time or another. It was Catherine’s son, Paul I, that made additions to the Palace. Paul was a bit of a peculiarity, really they all were, but Paul had a good bout of paranoia. So much so, that he had sentry boxes placed every few meters around the entirety of the palace and increased his personal guard. Not only was he paranoid, he also deeply disliked his mother. Perhaps for what she did to his father. His hate ran so deep that he couldn’t even stand any reminders of her, not even architecturally. Which meant that the Winter Palace, that his mother had quite literally redecorated to her own taste, was a bit too much. So he did what anyone would do in his situation and created his own castle. And so that is why, we now have Saint Michael’s Castle in St. Petersburg. The spot he chose for his new castle was on the exact spot where he was born. He’s even reported as saying that he wanted to

die on the spot he was born.

And in 1801 he got his wish. He was assassinated in his shiny new castle.

It was throughout the 18th and 19th centuries that improvements were continually made to the Palace. In the 1780s and 90s, Giacomo Quarenghi and Ivan Starov created new state rooms overlooking the Neva River. In 1826, during the reign of Nicholas I, Carlo Rossi added the 1812 War Gallery. But it wasn’t until 1837 that the biggest change would be made with a fire that destroyed the interior of the palace.

Lasting three days and reportedly being visible from 70 kilometres away, the fire absolutely gutted the palace. Although the royals, and future visitors to the Hermitage were in luck. Because, despite 30 guards losing their lives, only a few portraits were permanently lost. And the only reason the fire didn’t spread into the Hermitage itself, was because the passages that lead to the artistic wing were actually dismantled in an attempt to keep the fire isolated to the main palace.

Back then it would have been so chaotic and stressful, with the possibility of losing lifetimes worth of art. But today we know that the fault lay with an architectural design flaw. Supposedly, ventilation canals for the chimneys were much too narrow, and many of the canals were half-filled with building rubbish from the numerous upgrades made throughout the years. Leading to a disaster waiting to happen.

Once the fire was finally under control and extinguished, Nicholas I ordered that the entire interior of the destroyed Imperial Palace to be reconstructed almost exactly. Oh, and he wanted it done within the year. Given the size of the task, this was ridiculous. But what are the members of the Russian royal family if not ridiculous? Having the same view of everyday Russians as those that came before him, Nicholas expected the 6000 men employed to recreate the palace, to work, once again, through the dead of winter. And to cap it off, as these men died, they were replaced with new men, who no doubt also perished and this horrific cycle was repeated.

Amazingly, under Vasily Stasov, the interiors were fully recreated, with some of the rooms being decorated in the eclectic styles of the mid-19th century, and others being restored to Catherine’s neoclassical style. Alexander Brullov even added in a few more contemporary designs, just to keep things looking fresh.

Alexander II was actually the last Tsar to use the Winter Palace as his main residence. But being a common target for assassination attempts, the infrastructure of the Palace took a hit. Pun completely intended. In 1880 the plan was to kill the Tsar by setting a bomb off under his dinner table. But, fortunately for Alexander, dinner was delayed for the first time in ages, and the bomb went off without him. So naturally the dining room exploded.

Once Alexander finally succumbed to an assassination in the following year, his son, Alexander III decided that the palace was simply too big to make sure that everyone was safe and not being killed. So he decided to start making budget cuts to the operating budget, meaning that the more extravagant whims of the royal family were curbed. So table linen wasn’t changed daily, and soap wasn’t thrown away, it had to be used all up.

After Alexander III moved out, the Palace was mainly only used for official ceremonies and receptions. In fact the last time the Imperial family used the Winter Palace was in 1903 when the doomed Nicholas II held a masked ball commemorating the reign of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich, who was the 2nd Romanov Tsar. Nicholas and his wife, Alexandra, dressed up as Alexis and his Empress. They wore decadent 17th century clothes, and even posed for their last known photograph.

This last ball, pretty much did it for the peasants. It was the last straw for a starving people who held resentment and hostility towards the extravagance that was happening inside.

After the fall of the monarchy

The Winter Palace has witnessed its fair share of events. It lived through the royal occupation, and even survived the Russian Revolution.

In what has become known as ‘Bloody Sunday’, in 1905 a guy named Father Gapon lead a group of about 100 000 workers in a peaceful protest to the palace. They were hoping to present the Tsar with a petition. This didn’t go down too well, because they missed the memo that Nicholas II wasn’t actually living in the Palace anymore. The Tsar’s troops protecting the empty palace got a bit spooked and ended up firing upon the unarmed crowd, killing over 1000 men, women and children. This unnecessary use of force would be a turning point in the end of the Russian Empire. Even though Nicholas wasn’t directly responsible for the slaughter, it pushed him and his family along the path that would ultimately end in their demise.

In an attempt to gain back some popularity with the people, Nick released what is known as the ‘October Manifesto’. Basically it allowed a representative body of state legislation, or a Duma. The First Duma, for there were several, opened in the Winter Palace on 27 April 1906. This was an attempt to allow the Russian people to ‘feel’ as if they could put their voices and ideas forward to the Tsar and he would consider them. But old mate Nick wasn’t in the mood to lose what remaining control he had over his empire. Nothing was really accomplished with this First Duma and just 73 days later, the Tsar dissolved it.

It wasn’t too many years later that the First World War started, and while the Tsar and Tsarina briefly returned to the palace to farewell the troops departing for the front, the Winter Palace would soon be emptier than it had ever been before. The poor thing would be stripped of almost anything worth something as it was turned into a temporary hospital for returning wounded soldiers, as we have seen happen to many a great building at some stage in their long steady lives.

Some of the most precious items kept in the Palace were sent to Moscow for safe keeping. And as the World War turned into a Civil War for Russia, the front moved ever closer to Petrograd. Petrograd is the name St. Petersburg was known as between 1914 and 1924. The name change came about in a reaction to put distance between the Russians and anything German. As for the priceless objects, they weren’t returned to the Palace until 1921.

1917 was a pretty big year for the Russians and the Palace. The Russian monarchy was overthrown when Nick was forced to abdicate, and the February Revolution allowed Alexander Kerensky to take power, with the Winter Palace as his Provisional Government’s home base. It was also at the Winter Palace that the Provisional Government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks, who stormed the palace on 26 October 1917, or if you followed the Gregorian calendar at the time, like the rest of the world, the 7 November.

During the confusion that resulted from the Bolsheviks storming the palace, a good amount of pretty pricey objects were ransacked, including the massive Imperial wine cellars, which I’m imaging were filled with only the fanciful wines. Luckily for us though, this looting stopped before they got into the Hermitage.

Once the multiple revolutions settled down, the Palace itself was handed over to the State Hermitage, and declared part of the State Hermitage Museum. Even though the Bolsheviks saw it as their personal mission to remove any symbol that even closely resembled something Imperial, it wasn’t until after the effects of WWII had settled down, that the process of returning the Imperial objects to the palace began. And now, the state rooms, which have seen their fair share of ups and downs, are one of the most popular sections of the Hermitage Museum.

The Hermitage

As we already know the Hermitage was initially founded by Catherine the Great when she purchased some paintings from Berlin in 1764. And this amazing, world renowned museum actually ranks among the best of West European Art.

After the Russian Revolution, the Hermitage had its own ups and downs. The museum had a chance to buy valuable pieces from private collections that were no longer private and a lot of Russian artists were just giving their works of art to the museum. But at the same time they did have to sell a fair amount of art to finance industrialisation. So you know, worth it.

It was throughout the 1920s, that the Hermitage and the Winter Palace fused to become one. But I’d say it was the Museum who had the better deal, they were able to use all the empty palace rooms to show off their hoard of collectibles. Basically think of a master in the art world and the Hermitage will have something done by them among their more than 3 million exhibits. But it’s not just paintings that the Hermitage likes to collect, oh no. They also have antique sculptures, medieval art, cameos, ancient and 18th to 19th century gold and jewels, coins, archaeological finds and collections from Egypt, Iran, China, Tibet and Japan. Pretty much from Ancient Egypt to early 20th century Europe, the Hermitage will have it. They even have the Imperial carriages, that are just covered with gilded wood carvings, upholstered with velvet and decorated with French paintings.

When the German troops were reported as attacking the Soviet Union at the start of WWII, Hermitage staff and hundreds of volunteers started packing the exhibits up quick smart. They managed to get over a million works of art into two trains to Ekaterinburg, but just as the third train was being prepared the Germans descended upon Leningrad, which is what St. Petersburg was known as after Lenin’s death in 1924 until the very recent 1991. The trains arrived safe and sound and amazingly not a single piece was lost during the rushed excavation.

The State Hermitage Museum managed to reopen in 1945 and since then the Winter Palace has been the focus of preservation and conservation efforts. After Russia’s Great Patriotic War, or the Second World War’s Eastern Front for everyone else, the Hermitage was able to replenish their collections with trophy pieces that mysteriously made their way over from Germany.

1964, a Jubilee was held for the 200th anniversary of the Hermitage. In a showcase of the museum’s national importance and contribution to Russian culture, the Hermitage itself was awarded the Order of Lenin

for the museum staff’s major contribution to the aesthetic education of the workers.

What an honour.

It wasn’t until 1992, that the famous ‘Winter Palace of Peter I’ opened on display in the Hermitage Theatre. People who wander over for a visit can see the restoration and reconstruction of the Theatre building for Peter’s exhibition.

Today, the Hermitage Theatre, the Small Hermitage, the New Hermitage and the Great Hermitage all come together under the umbrella of the State Hermitage Museum. And it’s pretty bloody big. If you decided that you were going to spend one minute looking at every single paining, it would take you 11 years to look at everything. This enormous Museum is the largest art gallery in Russia and is one of the largest and most respected art museums in the world.

The Palace

As we already know, the Winter Palace can be found in St. Petersburg and is considered a classic example of world architecture. With over 1000 rooms, the Palace is 210 metres along the Neva River and 175 metres wide. Making it pretty big. Built in the form of a square the Palace has a large inner courtyard, and three archways allow access to the courtyard from the aptly named Palace Square.

The Palace is 21 metres high and dominates over the surrounding area. Local regulations even prevent any building in the city centre to be taller than the palace. Nicolas I was the one to pass a law in 1884 making sure that all buildings were 1 sazhen, or 2.13 metres, shorter than the Palace.

The exterior of the Palace is no doubt lavish. When you take a look you’ll find two levels of ionic columns with parapets decorated with statues and vases. There are even

numerous white columns [that] gather to form beautiful compositions or disperse opening windows, which are framed in lacy plat bands with lion masks and Cupid heads.

And the triangular pediment above the central archway even has bronze sculptures of Neptune and his wife to oversee any would be visitors.

Originally, architect Rastrelli had the outside of the palace painted a sandy colour, but this quickly disappeared under several layers of paint until we see the nice contrast of light green walls against white columns of today. The stone parapet of the building even comes with sculptures of Gods, nymphs, knights and vases. They present a strong symmetry, with 250 column segments and 700 windows. Now these are only on the outside of the building, the ones looking into the courtyard don’t count. The decorations that you see today are actually replacements. The original stone statues had been corroded by the city’s harsh climate and were replaced by copper ones in the 1890s.

Old mate, Rastrelli, had the idea to have each of the four palace facades have an individual structural rhythm. While all four facades are decorated by a two-tiered colonnade; the southern façade, facing Palace Square, presents a serious front of formal grandeur; the northern façade along the Neva River give the impression of an endless colonnade, especially when reflected off the water’s surface; the western façade, the one that looks towards the Admiralty, could remind you of a small front yard of a country palace, a more intimate feel; and the eastern façade shows off a large front yard as it faces Millionnaya Street, where the mansions that once belonged to the nobility stood.

The Winter Palace today

The current Winter Palace is the sixth version of a winter residence for the Russian Imperial family on the site and generally considered one of St. Petersburg’s most splendid buildings.

The Hermitage is said to attract about 3.5 million visitors a year, making it one of the most popular museums in the world. Most of the rooms are preserved and even open to visitors. Why not wander around some State Rooms.

The Palace has such a varied history and so many points of interest, that I couldn’t possibly include everything in this little podcast. So if you have some exciting Winter Palace knowledge, feel free to share it with your fellow Destination Historians.

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