Russian Winter Palace

Russian Winter

The Russian forest was bleak, dark and unforgiving. It was an hour past midnight in this timeless land where the fox, the rabbit and the bear all hid, shivering in the cold wind, waiting for the warmth of the summer sun to return. Even for what was expected of a typical Russian winter, this particular night proved to be brutally cold. An outsider passing through the dense stands of trees would never cease to wonder with amazement how the little creatures of life could survive the seemingly eternal chill. It was a chill whose only loyal partner was silence, interrupted occasionally by the crash of a falling ice-covered branch or the howl of a brisk breeze off a frozen lake. Yet, even the burrowed animals sensed that this night was somehow different from most they had experienced. Slowly but steadily, the eerie silence of the virgin forest was compromised by a rhythmic thumping, the drumming approach of multiple hoof beats. In the aura of a cloud-shrouded moon, the icy breath plumes of the Cossacks' horses gave the appearance of tiny explosions in the falling snow. No words were spoken as the ghostly military patrol crawled eastward in a column-of-twos along a frozen stream leading toward the southern shore of Lake Ladoga.

Travels in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, and Turkey

The Winter Palace and the People

St. Petersburg's Winter Palace was once the supreme architectural symbol of Russia's autocratic government. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it became the architectural symbol of St. Petersburg itself. The story of the palace illuminates the changing relationship between monarchs and their capital city during the last century and a half of Russian monarchy. In The Winter Palace and the People, Susan McCaffray examines interactions among those who helped to stage the ceremonial drama of monarchy, those who consumed the spectacle, and the monarchs themselves. In the face of a changing social landscape in their rapidly growing nineteenth-century capital, Russian monarchs reoriented their display of imperial and national representation away from courtiers and toward the urban public. When attacked at mid-century, monarchs retreated from the palace. As they receded, the public claimed the square and the artistic treasures in the Imperial Hermitage before claiming the palace itself. By 1917, the Winter Palace had come to be the essential stage for representing not just monarchy, but the civic life of the empire-nation. What was cataclysmic for the monarchy presented to those who staffed the palace and Hermitage not a disaster, but a new mission, as a public space created jointly by monarch and city passed from the one to the other. This insightful study will appeal to scholars of Russia and general readers interested in Russian history.