What Was the Winter Palace?
The Winter Palace stands on the north bank of the Neva, facing the Peter and Paul Fortress across the river, and runs 215 metres along the embankment. It is the third palace to occupy the site, designed by Bartolomeo Rastrelli for Empress Elizabeth in 1754 and completed under Catherine the Great in 1762. It has 1,054 rooms, 117 staircases, and 1,786 doors, and it served as the principal residence of the Russian emperors from 1732 until 1904, and as the ceremonial seat of the monarchy until 1917. The Provisional Government was installed there after the February Revolution; the palace was the dramatic target of the October Revolution, and the assault of the Red Guards and Kronstadt sailors on the night of 7-8 November 1917 (PST) gave it the central place it still has in Soviet history (see Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 1996).
The palace and the court
The Winter Palace was the centre of the imperial court. The empresses Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth, and Catherine II had all lived there; the male rulers of the eighteenth century, Peter II and the early empresses’ favourites, had often preferred smaller establishments, but Alexander I, Nicholas I, Alexander II, and Alexander III all kept their official court in the building. Nicholas II moved the imperial family to the more private Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo in 1904, but the Winter Palace remained the setting for the great state occasions: the New Year reception for the diplomatic corps, the imperial balls in the Nicholas Hall, the diplomatic banquets in the St George Hall, and the receptions of the State Council, which met in the palace until it moved to the Mariinsky Palace in 1885.
The palaces that preceded it
The first Winter Palace was a modest wooden house built for Peter the Great in 1708. A second, larger stone palace of the type that the French called a “maison de plaisance” was built in 1711-1712, and a third, the Peter III Palace, was built in 1732. None of these survived the fire of 1837, which destroyed much of the interior of the current palace; the building was rebuilt within a year and a half under the direction of the architect Vasily Stasov, but with the exterior kept unchanged. The 1837 rebuilding was so thorough that almost every surface one sees in the Winter Palace today is a Stasov surface.
The Hermitage Museum
The palace is now the main building of the State Hermitage Museum, one of the largest art museums in the world. The Hermitage was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great as her private gallery; the collection grew continuously throughout the imperial period. By 1917 the museum held about 2.6 million items — paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, archaeological artefacts, applied art, and a numismatic collection. After the revolution the collection was nationalised and the imperial family’s private rooms were opened to the public. The collection has continued to grow in the Soviet and post-Soviet period, and the museum’s holdings now exceed three million items (Hermitage Museum, 2015).
Key events
The palace is associated with several of the most dramatic events of the imperial period. The Decembrist Revolt of 14 December 1825 formed up on Senate Square, the open space a short distance from the palace. The assassination of Alexander II on 1 March 1881 took place on the embankment two kilometres from the palace, but it was to the Winter Palace that Alexander’s body was first brought. The Bloody Sunday march of 9 January 1905 was aimed symbolically at the Winter Palace, where Nicholas II was in residence. The palace was the symbolic target of the October seizure, and Sergei Eisenstein’s film October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928) opened with the storming of the building.
The palace in 1917 and after
The Provisional Government occupied the palace from 2 March 1917, the day Nicholas II abdicated, until the October seizure. The Soviet government moved its headquarters to the Smolny Institute, and the Winter Palace became a museum. The palace suffered some damage during the 900-day Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944), although it was never in the front line; the stuccowork and the parquet floors were largely preserved. The building was reopened to the public in 1945 and has been a working museum ever since (Kirichenko, Imperatorskii dvorets v Epokhu Ekateriny II, 1994).