Saint Michael's Castle

Paul I signed the decree in the first month of his reign, on 28 November 1796: a new, impregnable palace-castle was to be built "with haste" on the site of the dilapidated wooden Summer Palace of Empress Elizabeth — the building in which Paul himself had been born in 1754, and in which his mother Catherine had been proclaimed empress during the coup of 1762. Paul distrusted the Winter Palace, where he never felt safe, and had been sketching his ideal residence since 1784, while still a grand duke; by the time work began, his portfolio held thirteen variants of the design, drawing on buildings he had seen on his European travels of 1781–82. Memoirists recorded a story that a sentry on the site had seen an apparition of the Archangel Michael, or his messenger — a legend that may well have been spread by the emperor himself to justify the urgency — and Paul insisted from the laying of the foundations that the castle bear Michael's name.

The first stone was laid on 26 February 1797. Vasily Bazhenov produced the initial project from the emperor's own drawings, but within two weeks of the foundation ceremony he was dismissed for careless criticism of Paul's design, and Vincenzo Brenna carried the building through — with the young Carlo Rossi among his assistants, and Charles Cameron and Giacomo Quarenghi sent to help as the emperor pressed the pace.

Paul ordered the work to continue day and night, by lantern and torchlight, and up to 6,000 labourers were on site at once. Materials were stripped from other projects to feed the hurry: decorative stone, columns and sculpture from dismantled pavilions at Tsarskoye Selo and the palace at Pella, marble from the unfinished St Isaac's Cathedral — including an inscribed frieze set over the main gates — and inlaid parquet lifted from the Tauride Palace. The final bill came to 6,171,069 roubles.

What rose was a palace built like a citadel. A square block with rounded corners enclosed an octagonal courtyard, and the whole site was made an artificial island: the Moika and Fontanka rivers on two sides, the specially dug Church and Voskresensky canals on the others, crossed only by drawbridges watched by sentries, with cannon mounted on the bastions around the forecourt. There Paul set up the bronze equestrian monument to Peter the Great, cast back in 1747, and had its pedestal inscribed "From Great-Grandson to Great-Grandfather". At the end of 1798 Paul had become Grandmaster of the Order of Malta, and the castle wore the order's symbolism, a Maltese cross crowning the 64-metre gilded spire of its church. The building was solemnly consecrated on 8 November 1800 — St Michael's Day in the Orthodox calendar — though work on the interiors ran on into 1801.

Paul lived in his fortress for forty nights. On 12 March 1801 a group of dismissed officers led by General Bennigsen reached his bedroom, forced him to a table and tried to compel him to sign an abdication. He resisted; one of the conspirators struck him with a sword, and he was strangled and trampled to death. His son Alexander was in the palace that night, and was informed of his accession by General Nicholas Zubov — one of the assassins. From 20 to 23 March the emperor's body lay in state in the castle's Voskresensky Hall, the vast double-height room Brenna had designed for receptions and balls. The moats, drawbridges and sentries had kept out everyone except the men who mattered.

The imperial family returned at once to the Winter Palace, and the castle stood abandoned until it was given over to the army's Main Engineering School — later the Nikolayevskaya Engineering Academy — from which it has been known ever since as the Engineers' Castle. The Voskresensky Hall where Paul had lain in state traced the building's long decline: a store for astronomical instruments, then a chancellery and archive, offices of the Engineering Department in the 1820s, a training room for cadets, a gymnasium in the early 1950s, and a naval-library book depository in the 1960s. In the early 1990s the castle became a branch of the Russian Museum, housing its portrait gallery of Russian emperors, empresses and dignitaries from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century; the restoration the museum began in 1991 stretched across three decades, and as of 2021 was expected to be complete in 2024.