The Winter Palace has 1,500 rooms and began as a log cabin
Russia's tsars governed almost a sixth of the planet's land from a green-and-white palace on the Neva with 1,886 doors and 117 staircases. Yet the first royal home on that spot was a humble wooden cabin, and the building standing today is the fourth Winter Palace, not the first.
Peter I founded Saint Petersburg in 1703 as a deliberate turn away from Byzantine-flavoured Russian building towards the classical styles of western Europe. His first residence there, a log cabin from 1704, was later moved and still survives. A modest two-storey house designed by Domenico Trezzini followed in 1711 to 1712, then a second palace by Georg Johann Mattarnovi in 1721, where Peter died in 1725. Under Peter II, Trezzini expanded that building so much that Mattarnovi's whole palace shrank into one end pavilion of the third version.
The city itself was built at terrible cost. Forced labourers were drawn from across the empire, and an estimated 200,000 people died over twenty years of construction. Nobles ordered to live on the swampy site half the year hated it; felling trees for fuel was banned, so hot water came once a week, and after Peter's death many aristocrats simply left while wolves prowled the squares at night.
The present palace was built and reshaped almost without pause from the late 1730s, with the Italian Bartolomeo Rastrelli its best-known architect, working in what came to be called Elizabethan Baroque. Its main front runs 215 metres and stands 30 metres high. A severe fire in 1837 led to immediate rebuilding: the outside stayed the same, but much of the interior was redone in a mix of styles. By the end of the 19th century the rulers inside held sway over 125 million subjects.
The family had largely moved to the quieter Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo by 1905, when demonstrators marched on the building during Bloody Sunday. After the February Revolution of 1917 it briefly housed the Provisional Government under Alexander Kerensky, until Red Guards stormed it later that year. Sergei Eisenstein's 1928 film October turned that assault into a Soviet icon. Today the palace is home to the Hermitage Museum.
Source: Winter Palace
