Winter Palace

• 1. Introduction

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  The Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg holds 1,886 doors, 1,945 windows, 1,500 rooms, and 117 staircases inside a single building that once ruled a sixth of the Earth's surface. From those gilded halls, the tsars governed 22,800,000 square kilometres and 125 million subjects by the close of the 19th century. The principal facade alone stretches 215 metres along the Neva embankment and rises 30 metres into the Saint Petersburg sky. Yet for all its staggering dimensions, the building that stands today is the fourth attempt at a Winter Palace on that site. Three others came before it, each discarded or swallowed by the next. And on the 25th of October 1917, soldiers stormed through a back door left open by wounded and disabled guards, ending the Romanov dynasty's claim to the building and turning a palace into a symbol. How a modest log cabin grew into the largest royal residence in the world, why the architects who shaped it sometimes paid for their haste with their lives, and how a single night of revolution permanently altered what the building meant to the world, those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Peter's City and the First Palaces

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  Peter I of Russia returned from his Grand Embassy in 1698 and immediately set about transforming Russia into a European power, and the first physical sign of that ambition was a new city. Saint Petersburg was founded in 1703, built on a swamp with pressed slave labour. It has been estimated that 200,000 people died in twenty years while constructing it. A diplomat of the time first described the city as "a heap of villages linked together, like some plantation in the West Indies" but later called it "a wonder of the world, considering its magnificent palaces".

  Peter wanted his city built in the Flemish renaissance style he admired abroad, later called Petrine Baroque. The very first royal residence on the site was a humble log cabin called the Domik Petra I, built in 1704 facing the River Neva. It was transported away in 1711, and the Tsar immediately commissioned a larger house on the cleared site between 1711 and 1712. That building, the First Winter Palace, was designed by Domenico Trezzini.

  Peter soon grew dissatisfied. In 1721 the second version of the Winter Palace rose under the direction of architect Georg Johann Mattarnovi. That building was still modest by European standards but already more ambitious: two floors above a rusticated ground floor, with a central projection beneath a pediment supported by columns. Peter the Great died inside it in 1725. Only his second wife, Empress Catherine, ever claimed to enjoy the harsh life that Saint Petersburg demanded of its early residents.

• 3. Anna and the Fourth Palace

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  After Peter II moved the Imperial Court back to Moscow in 1728, Saint Petersburg fell into a kind of aristocratic neglect. Wolves roamed the squares at night. Bands of discontented serfs, brought in to build the Baltic fleet, frequently rebelled. The third Winter Palace, expanded by Domenico Trezzini for Peter II, stood largely empty.

  When Empress Anna Ivanovna, Duchess of Courland, took the throne in 1730, she reversed course. She re-established the court at Saint Petersburg, and in 1732 the city once again officially replaced Moscow as Russia's capital, a position it would hold until 1918. Rather than move into the existing third palace, she took up residence at the neighbouring Apraksin Palace and in 1732 commissioned the Italian architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli to completely rebuild and extend it. The core of the fourth and final Winter Palace is therefore not the creation of Peter the Great but the former palace of Admiral General Fyodor Matveyevich Apraksin.

  Anna herself was described by contemporaries as "dull, coarse, fat, harsh and spiteful", yet she brought a fierce appetite for luxury to her court. She designed new liveries for her servants. Mead and vodka gave way to champagne and Burgundy. Her nobles were instructed to replace plain furniture with mahogany and ebony. Anna's own dressing table was solid gold; her "easing stool" was silver studded with rubies. Her first ball, given in the newly completed gallery, was held in the depths of winter but arranged to resemble an orange grove.

• 4. Rastrelli's Masterwork and Elizabeth's Obsession

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  Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, seized power in 1740 through a bloodless coup that toppled the infant tsar Ivan VI. Her main home was the Summer Palace, and she left the Winter Palace in a condition described by the historian Vasily Klyuchevsky as "gilded squalor". Then, in 1753, Rastrelli devised an entirely new scheme on a colossal scale: the present Winter Palace, which would be the fourth and final version.

  For Elizabeth, the palace's completion became a matter of national honour. Work continued even through the most brutal months of winter, even as the ongoing Seven Years' War stripped resources from the Russian people and army. An initial allocation of 859,555 rubles, raised by a tax on state-owned taverns, proved far short of what was needed. Though the labourers earned just one ruble a month, the project ran out of money before it was finished. Taxes on salt and alcohol were raised to cover the difference. The final cost was 2,500,000 rubles.

  The exterior that emerged, still visible today, is Baroque in its bones: green and white, 215 metres long, decorated with statuary and opulent stucco on every pediment. The repetitive facades are broken only by symmetrically placed projecting bays. For years it stood as the tallest building in the city; in 1844, Nicholas I decreed that private houses must be at least 1 sazhen, or 2.13 metres, lower than the palace. That rule remained in force until 1905.

• 5. Catherine the Great's Art Empire

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  Catherine the Great arrived in Russia as Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, a German princess selected by Empress Elizabeth as a bride for her nephew Peter III. The marriage collapsed. Her husband was murdered following a 1762 coup. Catherine then appeared on the Winter Palace's balcony presenting her seven-year-old son Paul to the crowd below, though she had no intention of yielding power to him.

  Catherine's reign transformed the palace from a seat of government into the nucleus of one of history's greatest art collections. Her ambassadors in Rome, Paris, Amsterdam and London were instructed to purchase thousands of works on her behalf, often buying entire collections in a single transaction. Between 1764 and 1781 she acquired six major collections in succession: those of Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky, Heinrich von Brühl, Pierre Crozat, Horace Walpole, Sylvestre-Raphael Baudouin, and in 1787 the John Lyde-Brown collection. These brought to the palace works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, Raphael, Tiepolo, van Dyck and Reni.

  The Gotzkowsky collection of 225 paintings held particular satisfaction for Catherine. It had originally been assembled for her adversary Frederick the Great of Prussia, who, ruined by his wars with Russia, could not afford to pay for it. The Bruhl collection, acquired in 1769, arrived with two further Rembrandts: Portrait of a Scholar and Portrait of an Old Man in Red.

  As the collection overflowed the palace, Catherine commissioned successive extensions: first the Hermitage wing, designed by Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe; then a second larger building, the Old Hermitage, built by Yury Velten; then a third extension, the Hermitage Theatre, designed by Giacomo Quarenghi. That last construction required tearing down Peter the Great's crumbling third Winter Palace. In 1790, Quarenghi also redesigned five of Rastrelli's original state rooms to create the three vast halls of the Neva enfilade. Catherine's 1767 edict extending Russian serfdom was published while her palace was still growing in richness. During her reign she further enslaved over a million peasants. She died in 1796 still working on the building.

• 6. Fire, Rebuilding, and the Living Palace

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  Auguste de Montferrand was hired in 1833 to redesign the eastern state rooms, creating the Field Marshal's Hall and the Small Throne Room. Four years later, in 1837, a fire broke out inside the building. The cause was never determined, but the spread was blamed on Montferrand himself. Pressed by the Tsar for a fast completion, he had used wooden materials where stone would have been safer. Disused fireplaces were hidden behind hurriedly built partition walls; their chimneys and narrow ventilation shafts acted as flues, carrying the fire invisibly from room to room until it was beyond control.

  The blaze burned for several days. The Russian poet Vasily Zhukovsky described it as "a vast bonfire with flames reaching the sky." Guards and staff managed to rescue heavy furniture and fragile ornaments, depositing them in the snow in Palace Square. To stop the fire reaching the art collection, the Tsar ordered the destruction of the three passages leading to the Hermitage. That decision saved both the building next door and its contents.

  The Tsar then ordered the entire palace rebuilt within a year. The Marquis de Custine recorded what followed: "During the great frosts 6000 workmen were continually employed; of these a considerable number died daily, but the victims were instantly replaced by other champions brought forward to perish." Supervision fell to Pyotr Kleinmichel, already notorious for ruthlessness in the military settlements.

  The rebuilt palace used a metal framework to support the roof and iron girders across the great halls. The exterior and the Jordan Staircase were restored by Vasily Stasov to their original design. Some rooms grew more elaborate. The Malachite Drawing Room, rebuilt on the site of the destroyed Jasper Room, became the principal reception chamber of the Tsaritsa's suite. The Tsar's own bedroom was a stark contrast to everything surrounding it: no ornaments, just a few maps, an icon, and a camp bed with a straw mattress.

  At its peak as a working palace, the dining room seated 1,000 guests while the state rooms could hold 10,000 people standing. The rooms were heated so aggressively that exotic plants bloomed inside while temperatures outside fell well below zero. Servants lived in the attics beneath the metal roof framework. One former servant, discovered only by the smell of manure, had smuggled his entire family and a cow into the palace's upper reaches. Other cows were kept near the Maids of Honour's rooms to supply fresh milk to the kitchens; that practice ended after the 1837 fire.

• 7. Assassination, Decline, and 1905

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  Alexander II ruled the Winter Palace from 1855 until his assassination in 1881. A group called Narodnaya Volya, or Will of the People, made an attempt on his life inside the palace itself. Their leader was Andrei Zhelyabov, described as an "unsmiling fanatic", and his mistress Sophia Perovskaya. Perovskaya, whose father had been Governor of Saint Petersburg, learned through her connections that repairs were being carried out in the palace basement. A member of the group, a trained carpenter, enrolled as one of the workmen and every day carried dynamite hidden among his tools, placing the charges beneath the private dining room.

  The bomb was set to detonate during dinner. A guest arriving from Berlin was delayed, and dinner was postponed for the first time in years. As the family crossed from the drawing room to the dining room, the bomb detonated. The explosion was heard all over Saint Petersburg. Eleven members of the Finnish Guard in the room below were killed and a further 30 wounded. The New York Times reported on the 4th of March 1880 that the dynamite had been placed in an iron box and triggered by a system of clockwork, one of the first uses of a time bomb for political purposes.

  The revolutionaries succeeded on their next attempt in 1881, killing Alexander II on the streets of Saint Petersburg. His successor Alexander III was told it was impossible to make the Winter Palace secure and relocated to the Gatchina Palace, 40 miles away. His son Nicholas II married Alix of Hesse in a lavish ceremony at the Winter Palace in 1894, then immediately retired with his bride to live in six small rooms at the Anichkov Palace.

  In 1904, Russia went to war with Japan, and the Tsar and Empress abandoned Saint Petersburg entirely for Tsarskoe Selo. The final great gathering at the Winter Palace had been a themed fancy dress ball on 11 and the 13th of February 1903, recreating the reign of Alexei I. Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich later recalled it as "the last spectacular ball in the history of the empire", adding: "while we danced, the workers were striking and the clouds in the Far East were hanging dangerously low."

  In 1905, workers marching toward the palace, led by the Russian Orthodox priest Father Gapon in a peaceful petition of 100,000 unarmed strikers, were met by troops who opened fire. Moderate estimates place casualties at around 1,000 men, women and children killed or injured. The protesters did not know the Tsar was no longer living there. The massacre, known as Bloody Sunday, became the catalyst for the 1905 Revolution and set in motion a chain of events that would reach its conclusion twelve years later.

• 8. Revolution and Aftermath

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  On the 15th of March 1917, Nicholas II abdicated from a train. The Winter Palace briefly became the headquarters of the Russian Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky, who based operations in the north-west corner of the palace with the Malachite Room as the chief council chamber. By the 25th of October 1917, the government was failing. Most military personnel in the city had pledged loyalty to the Bolsheviks.

  A handful of defenders remained: some Cossacks, cadets, and 137 female soldiers from the Women's Battalion. The cruiser Aurora positioned itself on the Neva with its guns trained on the palace. The Bolsheviks captured the Peter and Paul Fortress and turned its artillery toward the building. At 7:00 pm the government held its last meeting in the Malachite Room, with all telephone contact severed. The Aurora began its bombardment of the Neva facade. By 2:00 am the Bolsheviks had control, arresting the Provisional Government in the Small Dining Room of the private apartments and conveying them to the fortress across the river. Kerensky escaped to Pskov and briefly retook Tsarskoe Selo before being defeated at Pulkovo.

  The Wine cellars proved as disruptive as the fighting. Described as possibly the largest and best-stocked wine cellar in history, containing among its treasures the Tsar's favourite, Chateau d'Yquem 1847, the cellars fuelled weeks of looting. The Bolsheviks considered piping the wine into the Neva, which drove crowds to cluster around the palace drains. They also considered but rejected the idea of exploding the cellars. Martial law finally restored order.

  On the 30th of October 1917, the palace was declared part of the Hermitage public museums. Three years later, on the revolution's third anniversary in 1920, the Bolsheviks staged a reenactment of the storming with thousands of participants and 100,000 spectators. Nikolai Podvoisky, who had led the original action, was so struck by the spectacle that he commissioned Sergei Eisenstein to make the 1928 film October. Eisenstein, working from the reenactment rather than the actual event, used banks of floodlights that appear in the film as evidence of his source.

  During the 1941-1944 Siege of Leningrad the palace was damaged. A subsequent restoration policy fully repaired it. Today the palace attracts an annual 3.5 million visitors, and the double-headed imperial eagles have been restored to the walls, balconies, and gates where Soviet rule once required their removal.