Looking at this 60,000-square-meter marvel that dominates Palace Square, it is hard to believe that the first Tsarist residence to occupy this site was a simple wooden house which was built for Peter the Great in 1708. However, over the past two centuries, the site has obtained its current pomp and grandeur.
In 1731 Empress Anna Ioannovna commissioned a famous master of the late Baroque period, Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, to create a larger royal residence on the site. The palace was completed in 1735. However, 17 years later, Empress Elizabeth called on Rastrelli again, to expand the building. The Winter Palace continued to undergo improvements and revisions throughout the 18th century, but in 1837 a huge fire gutted the building. A monumental effort to restore it was made by the Russian architects Vasily Stasov and Alexander Briullov, who were able to reconstruct the palace within a single year. Nevertheless, it was soon abandoned by the tsars. After the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, the palace was declared too large to be secured properly and the royal family moved to the suburbs of St. Petersburg. However, in the 20th century, the Winter Palace was fated to become the center of the country’s political life once again.
In January 1905, unarmed demonstrators were fired upon by soldiers of the Imperial Guard as they marched toward the Winter Palace, prompting a public outcry which would culminate in revolution. This marked the end of an era for the main symbol of royal wealth and might in the imperial capital. However, it also marked the beginning of the Hermitage as we know it now. The Winter Palace was first turned into a hospital for soldiers who were wounded in WWI, then into the seat of the Provisional Government following the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. The siege and storming of the building in late 1917 by the Bolsheviks became a turning point in the history of Russia and set the stage for one of the most famous scenes in early filmmaking.
A pioneer of Soviet cinema, film director Sergei Eisenstein immortalized the event in his silent movie October, also known as Ten Days that Shook the World. Dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, it was based on the storming of the Winter Palace, which was re-enacted in 1920 by Vladimir Lenin and the Red Army soldiers, and witnessed by 100,000 spectators. Due to the success of the movie and lack of the documentation of the actual event, Eisenstein’s scene is now perceived as the legitimate depiction of the siege of the Winter Palace, and is frequently used by historians and filmmakers.
Ever since then, the Hermitage’s main building has often been depicted in movies. In the late 60s, viewers around the world were exposed to the beauty of its halls, which featured in the Oscar-winning film War and Peace, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk. More recently, in 2002, prominent Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov filmed his historical drama Russian Ark entirely in the Winter Palace using a single 96-minute sequence shot. This definitely constituted a cinematic record, but was not nearly enough to depict all the highlights of the Hermitage.
