Has anyone died in The Winter Palace?

The first Winter Palace was a modest building of two main floors under a slate roof. It seems that Peter soon tired of the first palace, for in 1721, the second version of the Winter Palace was built under the direction of architect Georg Mattarnovy. Mattarnovy's palace, though still very modest compared to royal palaces in other European capitals, was on two floors above a rusticated ground floor, with a central projection underneath a pediment supported by columns. It was here that Peter the Great died in 1725.

Winter Palace

The Winter Palace () was the official residence of the Russian Emperors from 1732 to 1917. Today, the palace and its precincts form the Hermitage Museum. Situated between Palace Embankment and Palace Square, in Saint Petersburg, adjacent to the site of Peter the Great's original Winter Palace, the present and fourth Winter Palace was built and altered almost continuously between the late 1730s and 1837, when it was severely damaged by fire and immediately rebuilt. The storming of the palace in 1917, as depicted in Soviet paintings and Eisenstein's 1927 film "October", became an iconic symbol of the Russian Revolution.

The palace was constructed on a monumental scale that was intended to reflect the might and power of Imperial Russia. From the palace, the Tsar ruled over (almost 1/6 of the Earth's landmass) and over 125 million subjects by the end of the 19th century. It was designed by many architects, most notably Bartolomeo Rastrelli, in what came to be known as the Elizabethan Baroque style. The green-and-white palace has the shape of an elongated rectangle, and its principal façade is long and high. The Winter Palace has been calculated to contain 1,786 doors, 1,945 windows, 1,500 rooms and 117 staircases. Following a serious fire, the palace's rebuilding of 1837 left the exterior unchanged, but large parts of the interior were redesigned in a variety of tastes and styles, leading the palace to be described as a "19th-century palace inspired by a model in Rococo style".

In 1905, the Bloody Sunday massacre occurred when demonstrators marched toward the Winter Palace, but by this time the Imperial Family had chosen to live in the more secure and secluded Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, and returned to the Winter Palace only for formal and state occasions. Following the February Revolution of 1917, the palace was for a short time the seat of the Russian Provisional Government, led by Alexander Kerensky. Later that same year, the palace was stormed by a detachment of Red Army soldiers and sailors—a defining moment in the birth of the Soviet state.

Upon returning from his Grand Embassy in 1698, Peter I of Russia embarked on a policy of Westernization and expansion that was to transform the Tsardom of Russia into the Russian Empire and a major European power. This policy was manifested in bricks and mortar by the creation of a new city, Saint Petersburg, in 1703. The culture and design of the new city was intended as a conscious rejection of traditional Byzantine-influenced Russian architecture, such as the then-fashionable Naryshkin Baroque, in favour of the classically inspired architecture prevailing in the great cities of Europe. The Tsar intended that his new city would be designed in a Flemish renaissance style, later known as Petrine Baroque, and this was the style he selected for his new palace in the city. The first Royal residence on the site had been a humble log cabin then known as the Domik Petra I, built in 1704, which faced the River Neva. In 1711 it was transported to the Petrovskaya Naberezhnaya, where it still stands. With the site cleared, the Tsar then embarked on the building of a larger house between 1711 and 1712. This house, today referred to as the first Winter Palace, was designed by Domenico Trezzini.

The 18th century was a period of great development in European royal architecture, as the need for a fortified residence gradually lessened. This process, which had begun in the late 16th century, accelerated and great classical palaces quickly replaced fortified castles throughout the more powerful European countries. One of the earliest and most notable examples was Louis XIV's Versailles. Largely completed by 1710, Versailles—with its size and splendour—heightened rivalry amongst the sovereigns of Europe. Peter the Great of Russia, keen to promote all western concepts, wished to have a modern palace like his fellow sovereigns. However, unlike some of his successors, Peter I never aspired to rival Versailles.

The Winter Palace was not the only palace in the unfinished city, or even the most splendid, as Peter had ordered his nobles to construct residences and to spend half the year there. This was an unpopular command; Saint Petersburg was founded upon a swamp, with little sunlight, and it was said only cabbages and turnips would grow there. It was forbidden to fell trees for fuel, so hot water was permitted just once a week. Only Peter's second wife, Empress Catherine, pretended to enjoy life in the new city.

As a result of pressed slave labour from all over the Empire, work on the city progressed quickly. It has been estimated that 200,000 people died in twenty years while building the city. A diplomat of the time, who described the city as "a heap of villages linked together, like some plantation in the West Indies", just a few years later called it "a wonder of the world, considering its magnificent palaces". Some of these new palaces in Peter's beloved Flemish Baroque style, such as the and the Menshikov Palace, still stand.

On Peter the Great's death in 1725, the city of Saint Petersburg was still far from being the centre of western culture and civilization that he had envisioned. Many of the aristocrats who had been compelled by the Tsar to inhabit Saint Petersburg left. Wolves roamed the squares at night while bands of discontented pressed serfs, imported to build the Tsar's new city and Baltic fleet, frequently rebelled.

Peter I was succeeded by his widow, Catherine I, who reigned until her death in 1727. She in turn was succeeded by Peter I's grandson Peter II, who in 1727 had Mattarnovy's palace greatly enlarged by the architect Domenico Trezzini. Trezzini, who had designed the Summer Palace in 1711, was one of the greatest exponents of the Petrine Baroque style, now completely redesigned and expanded Mattarnovy's existing Winter Palace to such an extent that Mattarnovy's entire palace became merely one of the two terminating pavilions of the new, and third, Winter Palace. The third palace, like the second, was in the Petrine Baroque style.

In 1728, shortly after the third palace was completed, the Imperial Court left Saint Petersburg for Moscow, and the Winter Palace lost its status as the principal imperial residence. Moscow had once again been designated the capital city, a status which had been granted to Saint Petersburg in 1713. Following the death of Peter II in 1730, the throne passed to a niece of Peter I, Anna Ivanovna, Duchess of Courland.

The new Empress cared more for Saint Petersburg than her immediate predecessors; she re-established the Imperial court at the Winter Palace and, in 1732, Saint Petersburg again officially replaced Moscow as Russia's capital, a position it was to hold until 1918.

Ignoring the third Winter Palace, the Empress on her return to Saint Petersburg took up residence at the neighbouring Apraksin Palace. In 1732, the Tsaritsa commissioned the architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli to completely rebuild and extend the Apraksin Palace, incorporating other neighbouring houses. Thus, the core of the fourth and final Winter Palace is not the palace of Peter the Great, but the palace of Admiral General Fyodor Matveyevich Apraksin.

The Empress Anna, though unpopular and considered "dull, coarse, fat, harsh and spiteful", was keen to introduce a more civilized and cultured air to her court. She designed new liveries for her servants and, on her orders, mead and vodka were replaced with champagne and Burgundy. She instructed the Boyars to replace their plain furniture with that of mahogany and ebony, while her own tastes in interior decoration ran to a dressing table of solid gold and an "easing stool" of silver, studded with rubies. It was against such a backdrop of magnificence and extravagance that she gave her first ball in the newly completed gallery at the Winter Palace, which, in the middle of the Russian winter, resembled an orange grove. This, the fourth version of the Winter Palace, was to be an ongoing project for the architect Rastrelli throughout the reign of the Empress Anna.

The infant Tsar Ivan VI, succeeding Anna in 1740, was soon deposed in a bloodless coup d'état by Grand Duchess Elizabeth, a daughter of Peter the Great. Delegating almost all powers to her favourites, the new Empress Elizabeth assumed a life of pleasure which led the court at the Winter Palace to be described later by the Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky as a place of "gilded squalor".

During the reign of Elizabeth, Rastrelli, still working to his original plan, devised an entirely new scheme in 1753, on a colossal scale—the present Winter Palace. The expedited completion of the palace became a matter of honour to the Empress, who regarded the palace as a symbol of national prestige. Work on the building continued throughout the year, even in the severest months of the winter. The deprivation to both the Russian people and the army caused by the ongoing Seven Years' War were not permitted to hinder the progress. 859,555 rubles had been allocated to the project, a sum raised by a tax on state-owned taverns. Though the labourers earned a monthly wage of just one ruble, the cost of the project exceeded the budget, so much so that work ceased due to lack of resources despite the Empress' obsessive desire for rapid completion. Ultimately, taxes were increased on salt and alcohol to fund the extra costs, although the Russian people were already burdened by taxes to pay for the war. The final cost was 2,500,000 rubles. By 1759, shortly before Elizabeth's death, a Winter Palace truly worthy of the name was nearing completion.

It was Empress Elizabeth who selected the German princess, Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, as a bride for her nephew and successor, Peter III. The marriage was not a success, but it was this princess who, as Catherine the Great, came to be chiefly associated with the Winter Palace. In 1762, following a coup d'état, in which her husband was murdered, Catherine paraded her seven-year-old son, Paul, on the Winter Palace's balcony to an excited crowd below. She was not presenting her son as the new and rightful ruler of Russia, however; that honour she was usurping herself.
Catherine's patronage of the architects Starov and Giacomo Quarenghi saw the palace further enlarged and transformed. At this time an opera house which had existed in the southwestern wing of the palace was swept away to provide apartments for members of Catherine's family. In 1790, Quarenghi redesigned five of Rastrelli's state rooms to create the three vast halls of the Neva enfilade. Catherine was responsible for the three large adjoining palaces, known collectively as the Hermitage—the name by which the entire complex, including the Winter Palace, was to become known 150 years later.

Catherine had been impressed by the French architect Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe, who designed the Imperial Academy of Arts (also in Saint Petersburg) and commissioned him to add a new wing to the Winter Palace. This was intended as a place of retreat from the formalities and ceremonies of the court. Catherine christened it the Hermitage "(14)", a name used by her predecessor Tsaritsa Elizabeth to describe her private rooms within the palace.

The interior of the Hermitage wing was intended to be a simple contrast to that of the Winter Palace. Indeed, it is said that the concept of the Hermitage as a retreat was suggested to Catherine by that advocate of the simple life, Jean Jacques Rousseau. In reality, it was another large palace in itself, connected to the main palace by a series of covered walkways and heated courtyards in which flew rare exotic birds. Noted for its fine portico and attention to details of a delicate nature, it was richly furnished with an ever-growing art collection.
The palace's art collection was assembled haphazardly in an eclectic manner, often with an eye to quantity rather than quality. Many of the artworks purchased for the palaces arrived as parts of a job lot as the sovereign acquired whole ready-assembled collections. The Empress' ambassadors in Rome, Paris, Amsterdam and London were instructed to look out for and purchase thousands of priceless works of art on her behalf. Ironically, while Saint Petersburg high society and the extended Romanov family derided Russia's last Empress for furnishing her palaces "mail order" from Maples of London, she was following the practices of Catherine the Great, who, if not exactly by "mail order", certainly bought "sight unseen."

In this way, between 1764 and 1781 Catherine the Great acquired six major collections: those of Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky; Heinrich von Brühl; Pierre Crozat; Horace Walpole; Sylvestre-Raphael Baudouin; and finally in 1787, the John Lyde-Brown collection. These large assemblies of art included works by such masters as Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, Raphael, Tiepolo, van Dyck and Reni. The acquisition of 225 paintings forming the Gotzkowsky collection was a source of personal pride to Catherine. It had been put together by Gotzkowsky for Catherine's adversary, Frederick the Great of Prussia who, as a result of his wars with Russia, could not afford to pay for it. This collection included some great Flemish and Dutch works, most notably Frans Hals' "Portrait of a Young Man with a Glove." In 1769, the Bruhl collection brought to the Winter Palace two further works by Rembrandt, "Portrait of a Scholar" and "Portrait of an Old Man in Red".

While some aspects of this manic collecting could have been a manifestation of Catherine's desire for a recognition of her intellectual concepts, there was also a more fundamental motivation: necessity. Just twenty years earlier, so scarce were the furnishings of the Imperial palaces that bedsteads, mirrors, tables and chairs had to be conveyed between Moscow and Saint Petersburg each time the court moved.

As the palace filled with art, it overflowed into the Hermitage. So large did Catherine's art collection eventually become that it became necessary to commission the German-trained architect Yury Velten to build a second and larger extension to the palace, which eventually became known as the Old Hermitage ("15"). Later, Catherine commissioned a third extension, the Hermitage Theatre, designed by Giacomo Quarenghi. This construction necessitated the demolition of Peter the Great's by now crumbling third Winter palace.
The Empress' life within the Hermitage, surrounded by her art and friends, was simpler than in the adjacent Winter Palace; there, the Empress gave small intimate suppers. Servants were excluded from these suppers and a sign on the wall read "Sit down where you choose, and when you please without it being repeated to you a thousand times."

Catherine was also responsible for introducing the lasting affection for all things French to the Russian court. While she personally disliked France, her distaste did not extend to its culture and manners. French became the language of the court; Russian was relegated for use only when speaking to servants and inferiors. The Russian aristocracy was encouraged to embrace the philosophies of Molière, Racine and Corneille. The Winter Palace was to serve as a model for numerous Russian palaces belonging to Catherine's aristocracy, all of them, like the Winter Palace itself, built by the slave labour of Russian serfs. The sophistication and manners observed inside the Winter Palace were greatly at odds with the grim reality of life outside its externally gilded walls. In 1767, as the Winter Palace grew in richness and splendour, the Empress published an edict extending Russian serfdom. During her reign she further enslaved over a million peasants. Work continued on the Winter Palace right up until the time of the Empress' death in 1796.

Catherine the Great was succeeded by her son Paul I. In the first days of his reign, the new Tsar (reported by the British Ambassador to be "not in his senses") augmented the number of troops stationed at the Winter Palace, positioning sentry boxes every few metres around the building. Eventually, paranoid for his security and disliking anything connected with his mother, he spurned the Winter Palace completely and built Saint Michael's Castle as his Saint Petersburg residence, on the site of his birthplace. The Tsar announced that he wished to die on the spot he was born. He was murdered there three weeks after taking up residence in 1801. Paul I was succeeded by his 24-year-old son, Alexander I, who ruled Russia during the chaotic period of the Napoleonic Wars. Following Napoleon's defeat in 1815, the contents of the Winter Palace were further enhanced when Alexander I purchased the art collection of the former French Empress, Joséphine. This collection, some of it plundered loot given to her by her ex-husband Napoleon, contained amongst its many old masters Rembrandt's "The Descent from the Cross" and four sculptures by Antonio Canova.

Alexander I was succeeded in 1825 by his brother Nicholas I. Tsar Nicholas was to be responsible for the palace's present appearance and layout. He not only effected many changes to the interior of the palace, but was responsible for its complete rebuilding following the fire of 1837.

As completed, the overriding exterior form of the Winter Palace's architecture, with its decoration in the form of statuary and opulent stucco work on the pediments above façades and windows, is Baroque. The exterior has remained as finished during the reign of Empress Elizabeth. The principal façades, those facing the Palace Square and the Neva river, have always been accessible and visible to the public. Only the lateral façades are hidden behind granite walls, concealing a garden created during the reign of Nicholas II. The building was conceived as a town palace, rather than a private palace within a park, such as that of the French kings at Versailles.
The architectural theme continues throughout the interior of the palace. The first floor, being the piano nobile, is distinguished by windows taller than those of the floors above and below. Each window is divided from its neighbour by a pilaster. The repetitive monotony of the long elevations is broken only by symmetrically placed slightly projecting bays, many with their own small portico. This theme has been constant during all subsequent rebuilding and alterations to the palace. The only external changes have been in colour: at various times in its history the palace has been painted different shades. In the eighteenth century, the palace was painted straw yellow with white and gilded ornament. Under Nicholas I in 1837, it was painted a dull red, which it remained through the revolution and early Soviet period. Following the restoration work after World War II, it was painted green with the ornament depicted in white, the standard Soviet color scheme for Baroque buildings. (The Stroganov Palace, for example, was also green and white in this period.)

Internally, the palace appears as a combination of the Baroque and the Neoclassical. Little of Rastrelli's rococo interior design has survived; only the Jordan Staircase and the Grand Church remain in their original style. The changes to the interior were largely due to the influences of the architects employed by Catherine the Great in the last years of her life, Starov and Quarenghi, who began to alter much of the interior of the palace as designed by Rastrelli. Catherine always wanted the latest fashions, and during her reign the more severe neoclassical architectural influences, fashionable in Western Europe from the late 1760s, slowly crept towards Saint Petersburg. The neoclassical interiors were further emphasised and extended during the reign of Catherine's grandson, Nicholas I.

Quarenghi is credited with introducing the Neoclassical style to Saint Petersburg. His work, together with that of Karl Ivanovich Rossi and Auguste de Montferrand, gradually transformed Saint Petersburg into an "Empire Town". Montferrand not only created some of the palace's greatest neoclassical interiors, but also was responsible for the erection of the Column of Alexander during the reign of Nicholas I in Rossi's newly designed Palace Square.

For a long time the Winter Palace was the tallest edifice in the city. In 1844, Nicholas I gave the orders to the effect that private houses should be at least 1 sazhen (2.13 m) lower than the Winter Palace. This rule was effective until 1905.

The Winter Palace is said to contain 1,500 rooms, 1,786 doors and 1,945 windows. The principal façade is long and high. The ground floor contained mostly bureaucratic and domestic offices, while the second floor was given over to apartments for senior courtiers and high-ranking officials. The principal rooms and living quarters of the Imperial Family are on the first floor, the piano nobile. The great state rooms, used by the court, are arranged in two enfilades, from the top of the Jordan Staircase. The original Baroque suite of the Tsaritsa Elizabeth running west, fronting the Neva, was completely redesigned in 1790–93 by Giacomo Quarenghi. He transformed the original enfilade of five state rooms into a suite of three vast halls, decorated with faux marble columns, bas-reliefs and statuary.
A second suite of state rooms running south to the Great Church was created for Catherine II. Between 1787–95, Quarenghi added a new eastern wing to this suite which contained the great throne room, known as St George's Hall "(13)", which linked the Winter Palace to Catherine's less formal palace, the Hermitage, next door. This suite was altered in the 1820s when the Military Gallery "(11)" was created from a series of small rooms, to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon. This gallery, which had been conceived by Alexander I, was designed by Carlo Rossi and was built between June and November 1826 under Nicolas I; it was inaugurated on 25 October 1826. For the 1812 Gallery, the Tsar commissioned 332 portraits of the generals instrumental in the defeat of France. The artist was the Briton George Dawe, who received assistance from Alexander Polyakov and Wilhelm August Golicke.

Nicholas I was also responsible for the creation of the Battle Galleries "(19)", which occupy the central portion of the Palace Square façade. They were redesigned by Alexander Briullov to commemorate the Russian victories prior to 1812. Immediately adjacent to these galleries celebrating the French defeat, were rooms "(18)" where Maximilian, Duke of Leuchtenberg, Napoleon's step-grandson and the Tsar's son-in-law, lived during the early days of his marriage.

In 1833, de Montferrand was hired to redesign the eastern state rooms and create the Field Marshal's Hall and the Small Throne Room "(9 & 10)". In 1837, a fire broke out. Its cause is unknown, but its spread is blamed on de Montferrand. The architect was being hurried by the Tsar for an early completion, so he used wooden materials where stone would have been better. Additionally, between the hurriedly built wooden partition walls disused fireplaces were concealed; their chimneys, coupled with the narrow ventilation shafts, acted as flues for the fire, allowing it to spread undetected between the walls from room to room until it was too late to extinguish.

Once detected, the fire continued to spread, but slowly enough that the palace guards and staff were able to rescue many of the contents, depositing them in the snow in Palace Square. This was no mean feat, as the treasures of the Winter Palace were always heavy furniture and fragile ornaments rather than lighter paintings. To create a firebreak, the Tsar ordered the destruction of the three passages leading to the Hermitage, a fortunate act which saved the building and the huge art collection. The Russian poet Vasily Zhukovsky witnessed the conflagration—"a vast bonfire with flames reaching the sky." The fire burned for several days, and destroyed most of the Winter Palace's interior.

Seeming to ignore the size of the palace, the Tsar ordered that the rebuilding be completed within a year. The Marquis de Custine described the "unheard of efforts" that were necessary to facilitate this. "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." The work was supervised by Pyotr Kleinmichel, who had already gained a reputation for ruthlessness when serving in the military settlements under Arakcheev.

The rebuilding of the palace took advantage of the latest construction techniques of the industrial age. The roof was supported by a metal framework, while the spans of ceilings in the great halls were supported by iron girders. Following the fire, the exterior, most of the principal state suites, the Jordan staircase and the Grand Church were restored to their original design and decoration by the architect Vasily Stasov. Some of the rooms, such as the second largest room in the Winter Palace, the Armorial Hall, became far more ornate, however, with a heavy use of gilt. The smaller and more private rooms of the palace were altered and decorated in various 19th-century contemporary styles by Alexander Briullov according to whims and fashion of their intended occupants, ranging from Gothic to rococo. The Tsarevna's crimson boudoir "(23)", in the private Imperial apartments, was a faithful reproduction of the rococo style, which Catherine II and her architects started to eliminate from the palace less than 50 years earlier. One of the palace's most notable rooms was created as a result of the fire when the Jasper Room, which had been destroyed, was rebuilt as the Malachite Drawing Room, the principal reception room of the Tsaritsa's suite. The Tsar himself, for all the grandeur he created in his palaces, loved the greatest simplicity. His bedroom at the Winter Palace was spartan, with no ornaments save for some maps and an icon, and he slept on a camp bed with a straw mattress.

While the state rooms occupied the northern and eastern wings of the palace and the private rooms of the Imperial Family occupied the western wing, the four corners of the building contained the smaller rooms, which were the apartments of lesser members of the Imperial Family, often being of two floors. This is one of the reasons that the palace can appear a confusing assortment of great halls or salons with no obvious purpose located in odd corners of the palace. The fact that the Malachite Drawing Room is separated from the equally large Gold Drawing Room by a series of bedrooms and small cabinets initially seems unusual. However, when considered in the context that the Malachite Drawing Room was the principal reception room of the Empress' apartment while the Gold Drawing Room was the principal reception room of the apartment of her daughter-in-law, the Tsarevna, the arrangement of the rooms makes more sense. Similarly the vast White Hall, so far from the other grand halls, was in fact the principal hall of the Tsarevich's and Tsarevna's apartments. Thus the Winter Palace can be viewed as a series of small palaces within one large palace, with the largest and grandest rooms being public while the residents lived in suites of varying sizes, allocated according to rank.

As the formal home of the Russian Tsars, the palace was the setting for profuse, frequent and lavish entertaining. The dining table could seat 1000 guests, while the state rooms could contain up to 10,000 people—all standing, as no chairs were provided. These rooms, halls and galleries were heated to such a temperature that while it was sub-zero outside, exotic plants bloomed within, while the brilliant lighting gave the ambiance of a summer's day.
Guests on ceremonial and state occasions would follow a set processional route, arriving at the palace courtyard through the central arch of the south façade, and then entering the palace through the state entrance (sometimes called the ambassadors' entrance) "(38)". They would then proceed through the colonnaded Jordan Hall before mounting the gilded Imperial staircase "(8)", from where the two enfilades of state rooms spread out. The principal or Jordan Staircase, so-called because on the Feast of the Epiphany, the Tsar descended in state for the ceremony of the Blessing of the Waters, is one of the few parts of the palace to retain the original 18th century rococo style, although the massive grey granite columns were added in the mid-19th century.

One of the most important rooms was the Palace's Grand Church "(16)". Granted cathedral status, it was of greater religious significance than the chapels of most European royal palaces. It was here that Romanov weddings were usually celebrated with a rigid and unchanging tradition and protocol. Even the bride's dress, and the manner of donning it, was dictated by tradition. Dressed by the Empress, the bride and her procession would pass from the Malachite Drawing Room to the church through the state rooms.

The Imperial Family were not the only residents of the palace; below the metal framework in the attics lived an army of servants. So vast were the servants' quarters that a former servant and his family, unbeknownst to the palace authorities, moved into the roof of the palace. They were only discovered by the smell of the manure from the cow that they had also smuggled into the building with them to provide fresh milk. It seems this cow was not the only bovine in the attics; other cows were kept next to the room occupied by the Maids of Honour, in order to provide fresh milk for the kitchens. This practice was discontinued after the 1837 fire.

After the death of Catherine the Great, the Hermitage had become a private treasure house of the Tsars, who continued collecting, albeit not on the scale of Catherine the Great. In 1850, the collection of Cristoforo Barbarigo was acquired. This collection from Venice brought into the Winter Palace further works by Titian, in addition to many 16th-century Renaissance works of art.

Nicholas I, conscious of the great art galleries in other European capitals, saw that Catherine the Great's Large Hermitage "(15)" was vastly expanded and transformed into a purpose-built public art gallery. In 1839, German architect Leo von Klenze drew up the plans and their execution was overseen by Vasily Stasov, assisted by Alexander Briullov and Nikolai Yefimov. With so many architects involved there were inevitably many conflicts over the design and its execution throughout the 1840s, with the Tsar having frequently to act as moderator. Eventually, after eleven years of building and architectural conflict, the first art museum in Russia, the Imperial Hermitage Museum, opened on 5 February 1852. The trebeated facades of the building were inspired by Schinkelesque architecture. It was erected in grey marble round three courtyards and the complex is noted for the asymmetrical planning of its wings and floors. By order of the Tsar, visitors to the museum were required to wear evening dress, even in the morning. The Tsar also decreed that grey top hats were "Jewish" and dress coats "revolutionary." Having negotiated the dress code, what the public saw was a huge array of art, but only a fraction of the Imperial collection, as the Winter Palace and other Imperial palaces remained closed to the viewing public.

The Winter Palace was an official residence of the Russian sovereign from 1732 until 1917; however, it was their home for little more than 140 of those years. The last Tsar to truly reside in the palace was Alexander II, who ruled from 1855 to 1881, when he was assassinated. During his reign there were more additions to the contents; acquisitions included the ancient and archaeological collection of the unfortunate Marchese di Cavelli in 1861 and Leonardo da Vinci's "Madonna and Child" in 1865; Leonardo's second work of that same name, the so-called "Benois Madonna", was later acquired in 1914.

Alexander II was a constant target for assassination attempts, one of which occurred inside the Winter Palace itself. This attempt on the Tsar's life was organized by a group known as Narodnaya Volya (Will of the People) and led by an "unsmiling fanatic", Andrei Zhelyabov, and his mistress Sophia Perovskaya, who later became his wife. Perovskaya, the daughter of a former Governor of Saint Petersburg, was well placed to learn information concerning happenings within the palace and through her connections learnt of repairs being carried out in the palace's basement. One of the group, a trained carpenter, was subsequently enrolled as one of the workmen. Every day he carried dynamite charges concealed amongst his tools, placing them beneath the private dining room. So great was the quantity of dynamite that the fact there was an intervening floor between the dining room and the basement was of no significance. Plans were made to detonate the bomb on the evening of, assassinating the Tsar and Imperial family as they dined. Fortunately for the Romanovs, a guest arriving from Berlin was delayed, and for the first time in years dinner was delayed. As the family left the drawing room for the dining room the bomb exploded. So great was the explosion that it could be heard all over Saint Petersburg. The dining room was completely demolished and 11 members of the Finnish Guard in the Guard Room below were killed and a further 30 wounded. The incident represents one of the first uses of a time bomb for political purposes. The "New York Times" (March 4, 1880) reported "the dynamite used was inclosed in an iron box, and exploded by a system of clockwork used by the man Thomas in Bremen some years ago."

In 1881, the revolutionaries were finally successful and Alexander II was assassinated as his carriage drove through the streets of Saint Petersburg. The Winter Palace was never truly inhabited again. The new Tsar Alexander III was informed by his security advisers that it was impossible to make the Winter Palace secure. The Imperial Family then moved to the seclusion of the Palace of Gatchina, some from Saint Petersburg. By comparison with the Winter Palace, the 600 room, moated Gatchina Palace, set within forests, was a cosy family home. When in Saint Petersburg, the Imperial Family resided at the Anichkov Palace, while the Winter Palace was used for official functions. Large economies were made in food and wine. The Tsar was highly interested in the running costs of the Palace, insisting that table linen was not to be changed daily, and that candles and soap were not replaced until completely spent. Even the number of eggs used in an omelette was reduced. While the Tsar economised on household expenses, he added to the Imperial art collection of both the palace and the Hermitage. Officially, the Hermitage Museum had an annual buying allowance of 5,000 rubles, but when this proved insufficient the Tsar would himself purchase items for the museum.

Empress Maria Feodorovna (Dagmar of Denmark), the wife of Alexander III, saw that a garden was laid out in the centre of the main courtyard in 1885, an area previously cobbled and lacking vegetation. Court architect Nikolai Gornostayev designed a garden surrounded by a granite plinth and a fountain, and planted trees in the courtyard, laying limestone pavements along the walls of the palace.

In 1894, Alexander III was succeeded by his son Nicholas II. The last Tsar suspended court mourning for his father to marry his wife Alix of Hesse in a lavish ceremony at the Winter palace. However, after the ceremony the newlywed couple retired to the Anichkov Palace, along with the Dowager Empress. There they began their married life in six small rooms.
In 1895, Nicholas and Alexandra established themselves at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. This was to be their favoured home for the remainder of the reign. However, from December 1895 they did reside for periods during the winter at the Winter Palace. Architect Alexander Krasovsky was commissioned to redecorate a suite of rooms in the north-west corner of the palace, including the Gothic library.

In 1896, the wife of Nicholas II was credited for the creation of another garden (35) on the former parade ground, beneath the windows of the Imperial Family's private apartments. She had found it disconcerting that the public could stare into her windows. The garden was created by landscape architect Georg Kuphaldt, the director of the Riga city gardens and parks. This is only one of two gardens which remain today at the palace.

During the reign of Nicholas II, court life was quieter than it had ever been, due to the Tsaritsa's retiring nature and mistrust of Saint Petersburg's high society. In the Empress' opinion: "Saint Petersburg is a rotten town, and not one atom Russian." Under her influence, gradually the great court receptions and balls at the Winter Palace, which humoured and cultivated the powerful nobility, came to an end. They were briefly replaced by theatricals held in the Hermitage which "no one enjoyed", then even the theatricals ceased.

The final great Imperial gathering at the Winter Palace was a themed fancy dress ball celebrating the reign of Alexei I, which took place on 11 and 13 February 1903 (1903 Ball in the Winter Palace). Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich recalled the occasion as "the last spectacular ball in the history of the empire...[but] a new and hostile Russia glared through the large windows of the palace...while we danced, the workers were striking and the clouds in the Far East were hanging dangerously low." The entire Imperial family, the Tsar as Alexei I, the Empress as Maria Miloslavskaya, all dressed in rich 17th century attire, posed in the Hermitage's theatre, many wearing priceless original items brought specially from the Kremlin, for what was to be their final photograph together.

In 1904, Russia was at war with Japan, and the newborn Tsarevich was secretly ill; the Tsar and the Empress permanently abandoned Saint Petersburg, the Winter Palace, and high society (considered by the Empress to be decadent and immoral) for the greater comfort, security and privacy of Tsarskoe Selo. Thus it was that the Winter Palace, designed and intended to impress, reflect and reinforce the Romanovs' power, lost its raison d'être over a decade before the fall of the dynasty it was intended to house and glorify.

Following the Imperial Family's move to the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, the Winter Palace became little more than an administrative office block and a place of rare official entertaining. Throughout the year, the family moved from one palace to another: in March, to Livadia; in May to Peterhof (not the great palace, but a 19th-century villa in its grounds); in June, they cruised upon the Imperial Yacht, Standart; August was spent in Poland, at Spala, September was spent back at Livadia, before a return to Tsarskoe Selo for the Winter.

The Tsar betrayed his private views of Saint Petersburg in 1912, while addressing a farewell party of dignitaries and family bidding him farewell, as the family left for warmer climes: "I am only sorry for you who have to remain in this bog." However, to the Tsar's ordinary subjects, the Winter Palace was seen not only as the home of the Tsars, but a symbol of Imperial power. In this role, it was to be at the centre of some of the most momentous happenings in Russia's early 20th century history. Three of these events stand out in Russia's history: The Bloody Sunday massacre of 1905; the opening of the first State Duma in 1906, which opened in St George's Hall (13); and finally the taking of the palace by revolutionaries in 1917.

The Bloody Sunday massacre was a result of the public ignorance of the Tsar's place of residence. It occurred on during a demonstration march by workers toward the Winter Palace. The closest shootings of demonstrators occurred near St. Isaac's Cathedral at the entrance to the Aleksandr Gardens leading to the Palace Square in front of the Winter Palace. The massacre was sparked when a Russian Orthodox priest and popular working class leader, Father Gapon, announced his intention to lead a peaceful protest of 100,000 unarmed striking workers to present a petition to the Tsar, to call for fundamental reforms and the founding of a constituent parliament. The protesters were unaware that the palace was little more than an uninhabited icon of Imperial power, and that the Tsar no longer resided there. The Tsar was not informed of the planned protest until the evening before, while no suggestion was made that the Tsar should meet a deputation or send representative to accept the petition. Instead, the Minister for the Interior drafted additional troops. As the strikers neared the palace bearing religious icons and singing the Imperial anthem, the Tsar's troops opened fire. While the number of casualties is disputed, moderate estimates average around 1,000 men, women and children killed or injured. The massacre, which came to be known as Bloody Sunday, was a serious blunder on the part of the Okhrana and was to have grave consequences for the Tsarist regime. It was also to be the catalyst for the 1905 Revolution.

Subsequently, little changed politically in Russia during this period, and the Winter Palace remained in darkness. In 1913 the Romanov dynasty celebrated its tercentenary, but the crowds that flocked to see the processions were thin, the Empress appeared unhappy and the heir sick. The Tsar and Empress declined to hold a celebratory ball at the Winter Palace, instead holding two small receptions, both of which the Empress failed to attend. In 1914, Russia was forced to go to war as a result of the Triple Entente Alliance. The Tsar and Empress briefly returned to the Winter Palace to stand on their balcony to accept salutes and homage from the departing troops. Ironically, unlike the monarchs of Europe who stood on balconies adorned with velvet, flanked by their families, the Tsar and Empress stood, alone, in one corner of an unadorned balcony, appearing almost lost next to an oversized Imperial emblem, soon to be torn down by their own subjects. As the departing troops saluted their monarch in front of the palace, plans were being drawn up to store the palace's contents and convert the state rooms into a hospital to receive returning troops.

In the initial stages of the war, Russia endured heavy losses at the Masurian Lakes and Tannenberg and it was to the Winter Palace that many of the wounded returned. Rechristened the Tsarevich Alexey Nikolayevich Hospital, from October 1915, the palace was a fully equipped hospital, its staterooms transformed into hospital wards. The Fieldmarshals' Hall became a dressing station, the Armorial Hall an operating theatre. The small throne room became a doctor's mess room, while more lowly staff were accommodated in the Nicholas Hall and the Anteroom. Nurses were housed in the more intimate apartments once reserved for members of the extended Romanov family. The 1812 Gallery became a store room, the vestibule of the Jordan staircase the hospital's canteen, and its landings offices.
As the war went badly for Russia, its catastrophes were reflected in Saint Petersburg. The Tsar had decided to lead from the front, leaving the Empress to effectively rule Russia from Tsarskoe Selo. It was an unpopular move with both the Tsar's subjects and the Romanov family, as the Empress hired and fired indiscriminately often, it was supposed, on the advice of her favourite, Rasputin. Following Rasputin's murder by the Tsar's nephew-in-law in December 1916, the Empress' decisions and appointments became more erratic and the situation worsened and Saint Petersburg fell into the full grip of revolution.

Forced to accept the hopelessness of both the war and the situation at home, on 15 March 1917, Nicholas II abdicated in favour of his brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich. The Grand Duke promptly refused to accept the throne without the support of the army and his people. A provisional Government was appointed and many members of the former Imperial family were arrested, including the former Tsar, the Empress and their children. No member of the Romanov family have lived in the Winter Palace since the abdication in 1917 and very rarely did after 1905. Nicholas II, his wife and children were all held in captivity until they were murdered at Yekaterinburg in 1918. Other members of the former Imperial Family either met similar fates or escaped into exile.

It was this turbulent period of Russian history, known as the February Revolution, which for a brief time saw the Winter Palace re-established as a seat of government and focal point of the former Russian Empire. In February 1917, the Russian Provisional Government, led by Alexander Kerensky, based itself in the north west corner of the palace with the Malachite Room "(4)" being the chief council chamber. Most of the state rooms were, however, still occupied by the military hospital.

It was to be a short occupation of both palace and power. By 25 October 1917, the Provisional Government was failing and, realising the palace was a target for the more militant Bolsheviks, ordered its defence. All military personnel in the city pledged support to the Bolsheviks, who accused Kerensky's Government of wishing to "surrender Petrograd to the Germans so as to enable them to exterminate the revolutionary garrison."

Thus the provisional government, assisted by a few remaining loyal servants, who had formerly served the Tsar, barricaded themselves in the palace. Many of the administrative staff fled, leaving the palace severely under-defended allegedly by some Cossacks, Cadets, and 137 female soldiers from the Women's Battalion. Food ordered by the occupants of the palace was commandeered by the Bolsheviks, and, in a state of siege, the Winter Palace entered the most turbulent period in its history. According to Soviet history, five thousand sailors newly arrived from Kronstadt were deployed to attack the palace, while the cruiser "Aurora" positioned itself on the Neva, all its guns trained towards the Palace. Across the water, the Bolsheviks captured the Peter and Paul Fortress and turned its artillery towards the besieged building. As the provisional Government, now impotent, hid in the private rooms of the former Imperial Family, nervously surveying the scenes outside, one by one the Government buildings in Palace Square surrendered to the Bolsheviks, leaving the palace seemingly only hours from destruction.

At 7:00 pm, the Government held its last meeting in the Malachite Room, with the telephone and all contact with the outside world disconnected. A short debate determined that they would not leave the palace to attempt dialogue with the hostile crowds outside. With the palace completely surrounded and sealed, the Aurora began her bombardment of the great Neva façade as the Government refused an ultimatum to surrender. Further machine gun and light artillery fire were directed at the palace as the Bolsheviks gained entry via His Majesty's own Staircase "(36)". In the ensuing battle there were casualties on both sides until the Bolsheviks finally, by 2:00 am, had control of the palace. Leaving a trail of destruction, they searched room after room before arresting the Provisional Government in Small Dining Room of the private apartments"(28)", from where they were taken to imprisonment in the Fortress across the river. Kerensky managed to evade arrest and escape to Pskov, where he rallied some loyal troops for an attempt to retake the capital. His troops managed to capture Tsarskoe Selo, but were beaten the next day at Pulkovo.
Following the Government's arrest, an alleged eye witness account by an unnamed source records that the Bolsheviks began rampaging:

The Winter Palace's wine cellars literally fuelled the weeks of looting and unrest in the city which followed. Arguably the largest and best stocked wine cellar in history, it contained the world's finest vintages, including the Tsar's favourite, and priceless, Chateau d’Yquem 1847. So keen were the mob to obtain the alcohol, that the Bolsheviks explored radical solutions to the problem, one of which involved piping the wine straight out into the Neva. This led to crowds clustering around the palace drains. Another proposal, deemed too risky, was exploding the cellars. Eventually, the problem was solved by the declaration of martial law. It has been said that Petrograd, "perhaps with the biggest hangover in history, finally woke up and got back to some order."

The Winter Palace was now a redundant and damaged building symbolic of a despised regime, facing an uncertain future. "The Storming of the Winter Palace" was a historical reenactment organised by the Bolsheviks on the 3rd anniversary in 1920. With thousands of Red Guards led by Lenin, and witnessed by 100,000 spectators, the reenactment has become one of the "best known" events of the Russian Revolution.

Ironically, the Red Guard actually broke into the palace through a back door that was left open, guarded by wounded and disabled reserves. This gave rise to the occasion being described as the birth of the Soviet state. Nikolai Podvoisky, one of the original troika, which led the original storming, was so impressed by the re-enactment that he commissioned Sergei Eisenstein to make his film "". Certain features, such as the banks of floodlights which appear in Eisenstein's film indicate that Eisenstein was more influenced by the re-enactment than the original event.

On 30 October 1917, the palace was declared to be part of the Hermitage public museums. This first exhibition to be held in the Winter Palace concerned the history of the revolution, and the public were able to view the private rooms of the Imperial Family. This must have been an interesting experience for the viewing public, for while Soviet authorities denied looting and damage to the palace during the Storming, the Russian art connoisseur Alexander Alexandrovich Polovtsov, who visited these rooms immediately before and after the event, described the private apartments as the most badly damaged area of the palace. The contents of the state rooms had been sent to Moscow for safety when the hospital was established, and the Hermitage Museum itself had not been damaged during the revolution.

Following the Revolution, there was a policy of removing all Imperial emblems from the palace, including those on the stonework, plaster-work and iron work. During the Soviet era, many of the palace's remaining treasures were dispersed around the museums and galleries of the Soviet Union. Some were sold for hard currency while others were given away to visiting dignitaries. As the original contents disappeared and other items from sequestered collections began to be displayed in the palace, the distinctions between the rooms' original and later use have become blurred. While some rooms have retained their original names, and some even the trappings of Imperial Russia, such as the furnishings of the Small and Large Throne Rooms, many other rooms are known by the names of their new contents, such as The Room of German Art.

Following the 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad, when the palace was damaged, a restoration policy was enacted, which has fully restored the palace. Furthermore, as the Russian Government does not categorically shun remnants of the Imperial Era as was the case during Soviet rule, the palace has since had the emblems of the Romanovs restored. The gilded and crowned double headed eagles once more adorn the walls, balconies and gates. The Winter Palace is no longer the hub of a great empire, and the Romanovs no longer reside there, but the crowned Russian eagle serves as a reminder of the palace's Imperial history.

Today, as part of one of the world's best known museums, the palace attracts an annual 3.5 million visitors.

Hryniewiecki was taken to the infirmary attached to the Winter Palace. At 9 PM he regained consciousness, refusing to give any information to the police. He died from his wounds at 10:30 PM.

Ignacy Hryniewiecki

Ignacy Hryniewiecki (;, "Ignaty Ioakhimovich Grinevitsky"; party pseudonym: "Kotik", Russian for "Kitten"; 1856 – 13 March 1881) was a revolutionary and independence fighter, member of People's Will and the principal assassin of Tsar Alexander II of Russia.

Hryniewiecki was born in 1856 in Kalinovka, a village in Klichev District in present-day Belarus. His family was a noble family (or "szlachta") of a former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. According to his friend Lev Tikhomirov, Hryniewiecki called himself a Litvin.

In 1875 Hryniewiecki left for Saint Petersburg, where he enrolled in mathematics at the Polytechnic. Soon he joined the Russian revolutionary "Narodnaya Volya" (People's Will) movement.

In 1880 Hryniewiecki, Andrei Zhelyabov, Sophia Perovskaya and others were in charge of revolutionary propaganda among students and workers. Hryniewiecki was an organizer of the "Workers' Gazette" and a typesetter at a clandestine printing establishment.

In February 1881 Hryniewiecki joined the bomb-throwing unit created to assassinate Tsar Alexander II.

The night before the assassination, Hryniewiecki wrote a letter to posterity, part of which reads:

On 13 March 1881, (1 March O.S.) Alexander II was traveling in a two-seater carriage. An armed Cossack sat next to the coach-driver with Alexander II in the carriage while six other Cossacks followed on horseback. As the carriage approached a street corner near the Catherine Canal, Sophia Perovskaya gave the signal to Nikolai Rysakov and Timofei Mikhailov to throw their bombs. The Tsar was unharmed but two were wounded. Alexander II insisted upon leaving the carriage to check on the wounded. At this point Hryniewiecki, who was leaning against the railing by the canal fence, raised both arms and threw his bomb and the blast tore the Tsar apart. Just before throwing the bomb he was alleged to have shouted "It is too soon to thank God", in response to the emperor saying "thank God I'm untouched" to the anxious inquires of his entourage. Nearby, Hryniewiecki himself lay unconscious from the blast.

The assassination had been meant to ignite revolution. Hryniewiecki's fellow-conspirators — Nikolai Kibalchich, Sophia Perovskaya, Nikolai Rysakov, Timofei Mikhailov, Andrei Zhelyabov — were sentenced to death and were hanged on 3 April 1881. They were buried in an anonymous common grave.

The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood was erected on the site of the assassination.

Nicholas died on 2 March 1855, during the Crimean War, at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. He caught a chill, refused medical treatment and died of pneumonia, although there were rumors he had committed suicide. He was buried in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg.

Nicholas I of Russia

Nicholas I (; – ) was the Emperor of Russia from 1825 until 1855. He was also the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Finland. He is best known as a political conservative whose reign was marked by geographical expansion, repression of dissent, economic stagnation, poor administrative policies, a corrupt bureaucracy, and frequent wars that culminated in Russia's defeat in the Crimean War of 1853–56. His biographer Nicholas V. Riasanovsky says that Nicholas displayed determination, singleness of purpose, and an iron will, along with a powerful sense of duty and a dedication to very hard work. He saw himself as a soldier—a junior officer totally consumed by spit and polish. A handsome man, he was highly nervous and aggressive. Trained as an engineer, he was a stickler for minute detail. In his public persona, says Riasanovsky, "Nicholas I came to represent autocracy personified: infinitely majestic, determined and powerful, hard as stone, and relentless as fate." His reign had an ideology called "Official Nationality" that was proclaimed officially in 1833. It was a reactionary policy based on orthodoxy in religion, autocracy in government, and Russian nationalism. He was the younger brother of his predecessor, Alexander I. Nicholas inherited his brother's throne despite the failed Decembrist revolt against him and went on to become the most reactionary of all Russian leaders. His aggressive foreign policy involved many expensive wars, having a disastrous effect on the empire's finances.

He was successful against Russia's neighbouring southern rivals as he seized the last territories in the Caucasus held by Persia (comprising modern day Armenia and Azerbaijan) by successfully ending the Russo-Persian War (1826–28). By now, Russia had gained what is now Dagestan, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia from Persia, and had therefore at last gained the clear upper hand in the Caucasus, both geo-politically as well as territorially. He ended the Russo-Turkish War (1828–1829) successfully as well. Later on, however, he led Russia into the Crimean War (1853–56) with disastrous results. Historians emphasize that his micromanagement of the armies hindered his generals, as did his misguided strategy. Fuller notes that historians have frequently concluded that "the reign of Nicholas I was a catastrophic failure in both domestic and foreign policy." On the eve of his death, the Russian Empire reached its geographical zenith, spanning over 20 million square kilometers ( million square miles), but in desperate need of reform.

Nicholas was born at Gatchina Palace in Gatchina to Grand Duke Paul, and Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna of Russia. Five months after his birth, his grandmother, Catherine the Great, died and his parents became emperor and empress of Russia. He was a younger brother of Emperor Alexander I of Russia, who succeeded to the throne in 1801, and of Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich of Russia. Riasanovsky says he was, "the most handsome man in Europe, but also a charmer who enjoyed feminine company and was often at his best with the ladies."

On 13 July 1817, Nicholas married Princess Charlotte of Prussia (1798–1860), who thereafter went by the name Alexandra Feodorovna when she converted to Orthodoxy. Charlotte's parents were Frederick William III of Prussia and Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Nicholas and Charlotte were third cousins, as they were both great-great-grandchildren of Frederick William I of Prussia.

With two older brothers, it initially seemed unlikely Nicholas would ever become Tsar. However, as Alexander and Constantine both failed to produce sons, Nicholas remained likely to rule one day. In 1825, when Alexander I died suddenly of typhus, Nicholas was caught between swearing allegiance to Constantine and accepting the throne for himself. The interregnum lasted until Constantine, who was in Warsaw at that time, confirmed his refusal. Additionally, on 25 (13 Old Style) December, Nicholas issued the manifesto proclaiming his accession to the throne. That manifesto retroactively named 1 December (19 November Old Style), the date of Alexander I's death, as the beginning of his reign. During this confusion, a plot was hatched by some members of the military to overthrow Nicholas and to seize power. This led to the Decembrist Revolt on 26 (14 Old Style) December 1825, an uprising Nicholas was successful in quickly suppressing.

Nicholas completely lacked his brother's spiritual and intellectual breadth; he saw his role simply as that of a paternal autocrat ruling his people by whatever means necessary. Nicholas I began his reign on 14 December 1825 (old style), which fell on a Monday; Russian superstition held that Mondays were unlucky days. This particular Monday dawned very cold, with temperatures of −8 degrees Celsius. This was regarded by the Russian people as a bad omen for the coming reign. The accession of Nicholas I was marred by a demonstration of 3000 young Imperial Army officers and other liberal-minded citizens. This demonstration was an attempt to force the government to accept a constitution and a representative form of government. Nicholas ordered the army out to smash the demonstration. The "uprising" was quickly put down and became known as the Decembrist Revolt. Having experienced the trauma of the Decembrist Revolt on the very first day of his reign, Nicholas I was determined to restrain Russian society. The Third Section of the Imperial Chancellery ran a huge network of spies and informers with the help of Gendarmes. The government exercised censorship and other forms of control over education, publishing, and all manifestations of public life. He appointed Alexander Benckendorff to head this Chancellery. Benckendorff employed 300 gendarmes and 16 staff in his office. He began collecting informers and intercepting mail at a high rate. Soon, because of Benckendorff, the saying that it was impossible to sneeze in one's house before it is reported to the emperor, became Benckendorff's creed.

Tsar Nicholas abolished several areas of local autonomy. Bessarabia's autonomy was removed in 1828, Poland's in 1830 and the Jewish Qahal was abolished in 1843. As an exception to this trend, Finland was able to keep its autonomy partly due to Finnish soldiers' loyal participation in crushing the November Uprising in Poland.

Russia's first railway was opened in 1838, a 16-mile line between St. Petersburg and the suburban residence of Tsarskoye Selo. The second was the Saint Petersburg – Moscow Railway, built in 1842–51. Nevertheless, by 1855 there were only 570 miles of Russian railways.

In 1833, the Ministry of National Education, Sergey Uvarov, devised a program of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality" as the guiding principle of the regime. The people were to show loyalty to the unrestricted authority of the tsar, to the traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church, and to the Russian language. These romantic and conservative principles outlined by Uvarov were also espoused by Vasily Zhukovsky, one of the tutors of the Grand Duke Alexander. The results of these Slavophile principles led, broadly speaking, to increasing repression of all classes, excessive censorship and surveillance of independent minded intellectuals like Pushkin and Lermontov and to the persecution of non-Russian languages and non-Orthodox religions. Taras Shevchenko, later to become known as the national poet of Ukraine, was exiled to Siberia by a direct order of Tsar Nicholas after composing a poem that mocked the Tsar, his wife, and his domestic policies. By order of the Tsar, Shevchenko was kept under strict surveillance and prevented from writing or painting.

From 1839, Tsar Nicholas also used a former Byzantine Catholic priest named Joseph Semashko as his agent to force Orthodoxy upon the Eastern Rite Catholics of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. This caused Tsar Nicholas to be condemned by a succession of Roman Pontiffs, the Marquis de Custine, Charles Dickens, and many Western governments. See also Cantonists.

Nicholas disliked serfdom and toyed with the idea of abolishing it in Russia, but declined to do so for reasons of state. He feared the aristocracy and believed they might turn against him if he abolished serfdom. However, he did make some efforts to improve the lot of the Crown Serfs (serfs owned by the government) with the help of his minister Pavel Kiselyov. During most of his reign he tried to increase his control over the landowners and other influential groups in Russia. In 1831, Nicholas restricted the votes in the Noble Assembly to those with over 100 serfs, leaving 21,916 voters. In 1841, landless nobles were banned from selling serfs separate from the land. From 1845, attainment of the 5th highest rank (out of 14) in the Table of Ranks was required to be ennobled, previously it had been the 8th rank.

The official emphasis on Russian nationalism fueled a debate on Russia's place in the world, the meaning of Russian history, and the future of Russia. One group, the westernizers, believed that Russia remained backward and primitive and could progress only through more Europeanization. Another group, the Slavophiles, enthusiastically favored the Slavs and their culture and customs, and had a distaste for westerners and their culture and customs.

The Slavophiles viewed Slavic philosophy as a source of wholeness in Russia and were sceptical of Western rationalism and materialism. Some of them believed that the Russian peasant commune, or Mir, offered an attractive alternative to Western capitalism and could make Russia a potential social and moral savior, thus representing a form of Russian messianism. However the ministry of education had a policy of closing philosophy faculties because of possible harmful effects.

In the wake of the Decembrist revolt, the tsar moved to protect the status quo by centralizing the educational system. He wanted to neutralize the threat of foreign ideas and what he ridiculed as "pseudo-knowledge." However, his minister of education, Sergei Uvarov, quietly promoted academic freedom and autonomy, raised academic standards, improved facilities, and opened higher education to the middle classes. By 1848 the tsar, fearing the political upheavals in the West might inspire similar uprisings in Russia, ended Uvarov's innovations. The universities were small and closely monitored, especially the potentially dangerous philosophy departments. Their main mission was to train a loyal, athletic, masculinized senior bureaucracy that avoided the effeminacy of office work.

The Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg grew in importance by its recognition and support of artists. Nicholas I decided to control it personally. He overruled it regarding awarding ranks to artists. He reprimanded and humiliated artists whose works he found distasteful. The result was not better art, but just the reverse, compounded by fear and insecurity among members of the art community.

Despite the repressions of this period, Russians outside official control produced a flowering of literature and the arts. Through the works of Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev and numerous others, Russian literature gained international stature and recognition. Ballet took root in Russia after its importation from France, and classical music became firmly established with the compositions of Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857).

Minister of Finance Georg von Cancrin persuaded the emperor of the benefits of inviting Prussian scientist Alexander von Humboldt to Russia to investigate regions that could produce mineral wealth. The Russian government paid Humboldt's expenses for his eight-month expedition through Russian in 1829, which resulted in diamond finds in the Ural mountains. Humboldt published multiple volumes on his Russian expedition, which he dedicated to the tsar despite his increasing disapproval of the tsar's policies.

In 1851 the Jewish population numbered at 2.4 million with 212,000 of them living in Russian controlled Poland territory. This made them one of the largest "inorodtsy" minorities in the Russian Empire.

On 26 August 1827 the edict of military conscription ("Ustav rekrutskoi povinnosti") was introduced, which required Jewish boys to serve in the Russian military for 25 years from the age of 18. Before that many of them were forcibly conscripted into Cantonist schools since the age of 12, while being a Cantonist did not count into the time of military service. They were sent far away from their families to serve in the military so they would have difficulties to practice Judaism and thus be Russified. The poor, village Jews and Jews without families or unmarried Jews were especially targeted for the military service. Between 1827 and 1854 it is estimated that there were 70,000 Jews conscripted. Some of the Jews who served in the Russian military eventually converted to Christianity.

Under Nicholas I, the Jewish agricultural colonisation of Ukraine continued with the transfer of Siberian Jews to Ukraine. In Ukraine, Jews were given land, but had to pay for it, leaving very little to support their families. On the other hand, these Jews were exempt from the forced military conscription.

Under Nicholas I there were attempts to reform the education of the Jews in attempt of Russification. The study of the Talmud was disapproved as it was seen as a text that encouraged Jewish segregation from Russian society. Nicholas I further toughened censorship of the Jewish books in Yiddish and Hebrew by allowing these to be printed only in Zhitomir and Vilna.

Nicholas lavished attention on his very large army; with a population of 60–70 million people, the army included a million men. They had outdated equipment and tactics, but the tsar, who dressed like a soldier and surrounded himself with officers, gloried in the victory over Napoleon in 1812 and took enormous pride in its smartness on parade. The cavalry horses, for example, were only trained in parade formations, and did poorly in battle. The glitter and braid masked profound weaknesses that he did not see. He put generals in charge of most of his civilian agencies regardless of their qualifications. An agnostic who won fame in cavalry charges was made supervisor of Church affairs. The Army became the vehicle of upward social mobility for noble youths from non-Russian areas, such as Poland, the Baltic, Finland and Georgia. On the other hand, many miscreants, petty criminals and undesirables were punished by local officials by enlisting them for life in the Army. The conscription system was highly unpopular with people, as was the practice of forcing peasants to house the soldiers for six months of the year. Curtiss finds that "The pedantry of Nicholas' military system, which stressed unthinking obedience and parade ground evolutions rather than combat training, produced ineffective commanders in time of war." His commanders in the Crimean War were old and incompetent, and indeed so were his muskets as the colonels sold the best equipment and the best food.

For much of Nicholas's reign, Russia was seen as a major military power, with considerable strength. At last the Crimean war at the end of his reign demonstrated to the world what no one had previously realized: Russia was militarily weak, technologically backward, and administratively incompetent. Despite his grand ambitions toward the south and Turkey, Russia had not built its railroad network in that direction, and communications were bad. The bureaucracy was riddled with graft, corruption and inefficiency and was unprepared for war. The Navy was weak and technologically backward; the Army, although very large, was good only for parades, suffered from colonels who pocketed their men's pay, poor morale, and was even more out of touch with the latest technology as developed by Britain and France. By war's end, the Russian leadership was determined to reform the Army and the society. As Fuller notes, "Russia had been beaten on the Crimean peninsula, and the military feared that it would inevitably be beaten again unless steps were taken to surmount its military weakness."
An intensely militaristic man, Nicholas regarded the Army as the best and greatest institution in Russia and as a model for society, saying: "Here [in the Army] there is order.... All things flow logically from one another. No one here commands without first learning to obey. No one rises above anyone else except through a clearly defined system. Everything is subordinated to a single, defined goal and everything has its precise designations. That is why I shall always hold the title of soldier in the highest esteem. I regard human life as service because everybody must serve." Nicholas was often exasperated by the slow pace of the Russian bureaucracy and had a marked preference for appointing generals and admirals to high government rank because of their perceived efficiency. Of the men who served as Nicholas's ministers, 61% had previously served as a general or an admiral. Nicholas liked to appoint generals who had seen combat, and at least 30 of the men who served as a minister under him had seen action in the wars against France, the Ottoman Empire, and Sweden. This proved to be something of a handicap in the sense that the sort of qualities that could make a man distinguished on the battlefields such as bravery did not necessarily make a man capable of running a ministry. The most notorious case was Prince Alexander Sergeyevich Menshikov, a competent brigade commander in the Imperial Army who proved himself out of his depth as a Navy minister. Of the Emperor's ministers, 78% were ethnic Russians, 9.6% were Baltic Germans while the rest were foreigners in Russian service. Of the men who served as ministers under Nicholas, 14 had graduated from university while another 14 had graduated from a "lycée" or a "gymnasium", and the rest had all been educated by tutors.

In foreign policy, Nicholas I acted as the protector of ruling legitimism and as guardian against revolution. It has often been noticed that such policies were linked with the Metternich counter-revolutionary system through the Austrian ambassador Count Karl Ludwig von Ficquelmont. Nicholas's offers to suppress revolution on the European continent, trying to follow the pattern set by his eldest brother, Tsar Alexander I, earned him the label of "gendarme of Europe".

Immediately on his succession Nicholas began to limit the liberties that existed under the constitutional monarchy in Congress Poland. In 1830, Nicholas was outraged when he heard of the Belgian revolt against the Dutch, ordered the Russian Army to mobilize and asked the Prussian ambassador for permission for Russian troops to have transit rights in order to restore Belgium to the Dutch. But at the same time, the cholera epidemic was decimating the Russian Army and the revolt in Poland tied down Russian soldiers which might have been deployed against the Belgians. It seems likely that Nicholas's hawkish stance towards Belgium was not a prelude towards invasion, but rather an attempt to pressure the other European powers to invade Belgium as Nicholas made it clear he would only act if Prussia and Britain also joined in as he feared that a Russian invasion of Belgium would cause a war with France. Even before the Poles rose up, Nicholas had cancelled his plans for invading Belgium as it become clear that neither Britain nor Prussia would join in while the French openly threatened war if Nicholas should march. In 1815, Nicholas arrived in France, where he stayed with the duc d'Orleans, who soon become one of his best friends, with the grand duke being impressed with duc's personal warmth, intelligence, manners and grace. For Nicholas the worst sort of characters were nobility who supported liberalism, and when the duc d'Orleans become the king of the French as Louis Philippe I in the July revolution of 1830, Nicholas took this as a personal betrayal, believing his friend had gone over as he saw it to the dark side of revolution and liberalism. Nicholas hated Louis-Philippe, the self-styled "Le roi citoyen" ("the Citizen King") as a renegade nobleman and an "usurper", and his foreign policy starting in 1830 was primarily anti-French, based upon reviving the coalition of Russia, Prussia, Austria and Britain to isolate France. Nicholas detested Louis-Philippe to the point that he refused to use his name, calling him merely "the usurper". Britain was unwilling to join the anti-French coalition, but Nicholas was successful in cementing the existing ties to Austria and Prussia, regularly holding joint military reviews with the Austrians and Prussians. For much of the 1830s, a sort of "cold war" existed between the liberal "western bloc" of France and Britain vs. the reactionary "eastern bloc" of Austria, Prussia and Russia.

After the November Uprising broke out, in 1831 the Polish parliament deposed Nicholas as king of Poland in response to his repeated curtailment of its constitutional rights. The Tsar reacted by sending Russian troops into Poland. Nicholas crushed the rebellion, abrogated the Polish constitution, reduced Poland to the status of a province, Privislinsky Krai, and embarked on a policy of repression towards Catholics. In the 1840s Nicholas reduced 64,000 Polish nobles to commoner status.

In 1848, when a series of revolutions convulsed Europe, Nicholas was in the forefront of reaction. In 1849, he helped the Habsburgs to suppress the uprising in Hungary, and he also urged Prussia not to adopt a liberal constitution.

While Nicholas was attempting to maintain the status quo in Europe, he followed a somewhat more aggressive policy toward the neighboring empires to the south, the Ottoman Empire and Persia. Nicholas was widely believed at the time to be following the traditional Russian policy of resolving the so-called Eastern Question by seeking to partition the Ottoman Empire and establish a protectorate over the Orthodox population of the Balkans, still largely under Ottoman control in the 1820s. In fact, Nicholas was deeply committed to upholding the status quo in Europe and feared any attempt to devour the decaying Ottoman Empire would both upset his ally Austria, which also had interests in the Balkans, and bring about an Anglo-French coalition in defense of the Ottomans. Furthermore, in the war of 1828–29, the Russians defeated the Ottomans in every battle fought in the field and advanced deep into the Balkans, but the Russians discovered that they lacked the necessary logistical strength to take Constantinople.

Nicholas's policy towards the Ottoman Empire was to use the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774), which gave Russia a vague right as protector of Orthodox peoples in the Balkans, as a way of placing the Ottoman Empire into the Russian sphere of influence, which was felt to be a more achievable goal than conquering the entire Ottoman Empire. Nicholas actually wanted to preserve the Ottoman Empire as a stable but weak state that would be unable to stand up to Russia, which was felt to serve Russia's interests. Nicholas always thought of Russia as first and foremost a European power and regarded Europe as more important than the Middle East. The Russian Foreign Minister Karl Nesselrode wrote in letter to his ambassador in Constantinople Nikolai Muravyov that the victory of Muhammad Ali of Egypt over Mahmud II would lead to a new dynasty ruling the Ottoman Empire. Nesselrode continued that if the able Muhammad Ali become sultan then it "could, with the elevation of a new personage to the Turkish throne, revive new strength in that declining empire and distract our attention and forces from European affairs, and thus the monarch [Nicholas] is especially concerned to keep the sultan on his tottering throne." At the same time, Nicholas argued that because of the economic importance to Russia of the Turkish straits, through which Russia exports its grain, that Russia had the "right" to intervene in Ottoman affairs in the same way that Britain claimed to have the "right" to intervene in Portugal. In 1833, Nicholas told the Austrian ambassador Karl Ludwig von Ficquelmont that "Oriental affairs are above all a matter for Russia." At the same time that Nicholas claimed the Ottoman Empire was within the Russian sphere of influence, he made it clear that he had no interest in annexing the empire. At another meeting with Ficquelmont in 1833, Nicholas, speaking with the "Greek Project" of Catherine the Great in mind said: "I know everything that has been said of the projects of the Empress Catherine, and Russia has renounced the goal she had set out. I wish to maintain the Turkish empire... It if falls, I do not desire its debris. I need nothing." Ultimately, Nicholas's policies in the Near East proved to be both costly and largely futile.

In 1826–28, Nicholas fought the Russo-Persian War (1826–28), which ended with Persia forced to cede its last remaining territories in the Caucasus. Russia had conquered all the territories of Iran in both the North Caucasus and South Caucasus, comprising modern-day Georgia, Dagestan, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, through the course of the 19th century. The treaty further conceded extraterritoriality to Russian subjects in Iran (capitulation). As Professor Virginia Aksan adds, the 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay "removed Iran from the military equation."

Russia fought a successful war against the Ottomans in 1828–29, but it did little to increase Russian power in Europe. Only a small Greek state became independent in the Balkans, with limited Russian influence. In 1833, Russia negotiated the Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi with the Ottoman Empire. The major European parties mistakenly believed that the treaty contained a secret clause granting Russia the right to send warships through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits. By the London Straits Convention of 1841, they affirmed Ottoman control over the straits and forbade any power, including Russia, to send warships through the straits. Buoyed by his role in suppressing the revolutions of 1848 and his mistaken belief that he had British diplomatic support, Nicholas moved against the Ottomans, who declared war on Russia on 8 October 1853. On 30 November 1853, Russian Admiral Nakhimov caught the Turkish fleet in the harbor at Sinope and destroyed it.

Fearing the results of an Ottoman defeat by Russia, in 1854 Britain, France, the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Ottoman Empire joined forces in the conflict known as the Crimean War to the Ottomans and Western Europeans, but often known in Russia as the "Eastern War" (Russian: Восточная война, "Vostochnaya Vojna"). In April 1854, Austria signed a defensive pact with Prussia. Thus, Russia found herself in a war with the whole of Europe allied against her.

In 1853 Mikhail Pogodin, professor of history at Moscow University, wrote a memorandum to the Nicholas. Tsar Nicholas himself read Pogodin's text and approvingly commented: "That is the whole point."
Austria offered the Ottomans diplomatic support, and Prussia remained neutral, thus leaving Russia without any allies on the continent. The European allies landed in Crimea and laid siege to the well-fortified Russian base at Sevastopol. The Russians lost battles at Alma in September 1854 and then at Balaklava and Inkerman. After the prolonged Siege of Sevastopol (1854–55) the base fell, exposing Russia's inability to defend a major fortification on its own soil. On the death of Nicholas I, Alexander II became Tsar. On 15 January 1856, the new tsar took Russia out of the war on very unfavorable terms, which included the loss of a naval fleet on the Black Sea.

Nicholas died on 2 March 1855, during the Crimean War, at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. He caught a chill, refused medical treatment and died of pneumonia, although there were rumors he had committed suicide. He was buried in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg.

There have been many damning verdicts on Nicholas's rule and legacy. At the end of his life, one of his most devoted civil servants, A.V. Nikitenko, opined, "The main failing of the reign of Nicholas Pavlovich was that it was all a mistake." However, from time to time, efforts are made to revive Nicholas's reputation. Historian Barbara Jelavich, on the other hand, points to many failures, including the "catastrophic state of Russian finances," the badly equipped army, the inadequate transportation system, and a bureaucracy "which was characterized by graft, corruption, and inefficiency."

Kiev University was founded in 1834 by Nicholas. In 1854, there were 3600 university students in Russia, 1000 fewer than in 1848. Censorship was omnipresent; historian Hugh Seton-Watson says, "The intellectual atmosphere remained oppressive until the end of the reign."

As a traveler in Spain, Italy and Russia, the Frenchman Marquis de Custine said in his widely read book "Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia" that, inside, Nicholas was a good person, and behaved as he did only because he believed he had to: "If the Emperor, has no more of mercy in his heart than he reveals in his policies, then I pity Russia; if, on the other hand, his true sentiments are really superior to his acts, then I pity the Emperor."

Nicholas figures in an urban legend about the Saint Petersburg–Moscow Railway. When it was planned in 1842, he supposedly demanded the shortest path be used despite major obstacles in the way. The story says he used a ruler to draw the straight line itself. However the false story became popular in Russia and Britain as an explanation of how badly the country was governed. By the 1870s, however, Russians were telling a different version, claiming the tsar was wise to overcome local interests that wanted the railway diverted this way and that. What actually happened was that the road was laid out by engineers and he endorsed their advice to build in a straight line.Nicholas I had seven legitimate children with his wife, Alexandra Feodorovna.
Nicholas I also had illegitimate issue:

It is speculated that Nicholas I was also the father to Count Constantin Kleinmichel, Countess Catherine d'Andrini (1849–1937), Natalia Wodimova (1819–1876), and Alexei Pashkine (17 April 1831 – 20 June 1863), although these children are only speculated to be his by historians.