Winter Palace

Peter the Great died in 1725 in the Winter Palace built for him by Georg Johann Mattarnovi, which Peter II had Domenico Trezzini greatly enlarge in 1727. Anna Ivanovna, restoring the court to Saint Petersburg, ignored that palace for the neighbouring Apraksin Palace, commissioning the architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli to rebuild and extend it from 1732.

Rastrelli devised an entirely new scheme in 1753, and the present palace was built in 1754-1762 in the Elizabethan Baroque manner. Elizabeth pressed for speed: work went on through the severest winter months, and the demands of the Seven Years' War were not allowed to slow it. The allocated 859,555 roubles, raised by a tax on state taverns, ran out; taxes on salt and alcohol were raised to cover the excess, and the final cost was 2,500,000 roubles. The labourers, serfs, earned a rouble a month.

In 1762, after the coup in which her husband was murdered, Catherine II showed her seven-year-old son Paul on the palace balcony while taking the throne herself. She had Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe add a wing as a retreat from court ceremony and named it the Hermitage; as the collections grew Yury Velten built a larger second extension and Giacomo Quarenghi a third with the Hermitage Theatre, which required demolishing Peter the Great's by then crumbling winter palace.

From 1764 Catherine bought six major collections outright, among them the 225 paintings Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky had assembled for Frederick the Great of Prussia. In 1767 the Empress published an edict extending Russian serfdom; over her reign more than a million peasants were further enslaved. Work continued until her death in 1796.

A fire broke out in 1837 whose cause is unknown; its spread was blamed on Auguste de Montferrand, hurried by Nicholas I into using timber where stone would have served. The Tsar ordered the three passages to the Hermitage destroyed as a firebreak, which saved the art collection; the fire burned for several days and destroyed most of the interior.

Nicholas I ordered the rebuilding finished within a year. The Marquis de Custine recorded that 6,000 workmen laboured through the great frosts, of whom a considerable number died daily and were replaced at once. Vasily Stasov restored the exterior, most of the principal state suites, the Jordan Staircase and the Grand Church to their old designs, while Alexander Briullov redecorated the private rooms. The Imperial Hermitage Museum, formed from Catherine's Large Hermitage to plans by Leo von Klenze of 1839, opened on 5 February 1852.

On 17 February 1880 a bomb planted by the Narodnaya Volya group exploded beneath the private dining room, carried in by a carpenter hired among the basement repair workmen. Dinner was late and the imperial family survived; eleven men of the Finnish Guard in the room below were killed and thirty wounded. Alexander II was assassinated in the street in 1881, after which the family moved to Gatchina and the palace served official functions. On 22 January 1905 a march of striking workers led by Father Gapon approached it to present a petition; the troops opened fire, and moderate estimates put about a thousand killed or injured.

From October 1915 the state rooms served as the Tsarevich Alexey Nikolayevich Hospital. After Nicholas II abdicated on 15 March 1917 the Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky sat in the north-west corner, with the Malachite Room as its council chamber. On 25 October 1917 the cruiser Aurora shelled the Neva front; Bolshevik forces entered by His Majesty's own Staircase, held the building by two in the morning and arrested the government in the Small Dining Room.

On 30 October 1917 the palace was declared part of the Hermitage public museums, and a State Museum of the Revolution shared the building with the Hermitage from January 1920 until 1941. Imperial emblems were stripped from the stone, plaster and ironwork, and through the Soviet period many remaining treasures were dispersed, sold for hard currency or given to visiting dignitaries.

The palace was damaged during the 1941-1944 siege of Leningrad and restored afterwards; the Romanov double-headed eagles have since been put back on walls, balconies and gates, and the garden railings were restored in 2022. It is a federal cultural heritage site, houses the main displays of the State Hermitage, and draws 3.5 million visitors a year.