Catherine Palace is the wrong color for a building that has held this much sorrow. It is turquoise — a bright, almost springtime blue — with white columns, gold capitals, and a long Baroque facade that runs for 325 meters along its parade court. Bartolomeo Rastrelli built it for the Empress Elizabeth in the 1750s, and on a clear summer day with the gilt blazing in the sun it can look like a confection rather than a building. Inside, in 1942, the Wehrmacht stripped what they could carry, including the panels of the famous Amber Room, which has never been recovered. Outside, in the long shaded park, the gravel paths still lead to the same pavilions, the same artificial lake big enough for small sailboats, and across to the smaller, more melancholy Alexander Palace where a family was held under house arrest in 1917.
Before the Russians arrived, the place was Swedish Ingria, and a small Finnish village called Saari-mois stood on the rise where the palaces now stand. When Peter the Great took the mouth of the Neva from Sweden in the early 1700s and founded Saint Petersburg, he gave the estate to his second wife, Catherine — born Marta Skavronska, a Livonian peasant, who would rule in her own right after his death as Catherine I. The Russified Sarskaya became Tsarskoye, and the estate took its enduring name: Tsar's Village. Empress Elizabeth, Peter's daughter, made it her great project. It was Elizabeth who hired Rastrelli for the palace and who insisted, in the middle of the Seven Years' War, that work continue at all hours and at any cost. The final bill came to two and a half million rubles. The Russian people, already taxed for the war, were taxed again on salt and alcohol to pay for it.
Catherine the Great inherited it next and made it more than a palace — she made it an idea. She built Charles Cameron's gallery, the Chinese village in the park, the pink Turkish bath, the Pyramid where her favorite dogs were buried. The Palladian Bridge over the lake. The Cameron Gallery raised on its tall arches so that the Empress could walk in covered air. In 1811 her grandson, Alexander I, founded the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum in a wing near the Catherine Palace — a small experimental school for the sons of the nobility. Among its first class was a thirteen-year-old boy named Alexander Pushkin, who would write his earliest verses here, fall in love with the gardens, and shape the Russian literary language while walking these gravel paths. He never forgot the place. After the Revolution the town would be renamed for him: Pushkin, the name it still carries on Russian maps.
Five hundred yards from the Catherine Palace, across the formal park, stands a quieter and lower building in pale yellow, finished in the 1790s by Giacomo Quarenghi for Catherine the Great's grandson — the future Alexander I. It is the Alexander Palace, neoclassical and reserved where the Catherine Palace shouts. Nicholas II made it his home. From 1905, after the violence of Bloody Sunday made the Winter Palace feel unsafe, the last Tsar and his family rarely lived anywhere else. The Tsarevich Alexei played in its rooms. The grand duchesses had their suites on the upper floor. After the abdication of 15 March 1917, Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children were held under house arrest at the Alexander Palace until 13 August, when the Provisional Government moved them east — first to Tobolsk, then to Yekaterinburg, where they were murdered in a basement on the night of 17 July 1918. The Alexander Palace today is a museum that includes their preserved private rooms.
There is one more first associated with this place. In 1837 the Tsarskoye Selo Railway opened, running between the imperial estate and Saint Petersburg — the first public railway in Russia. The Tsar's family no longer needed to travel by carriage along the dusty road south. Their own private station, the Imperial Pavilion, was eventually built nearby in a style that imitated old Russian wooden church architecture, and the Tsar's train, with its blue carriages, would pull up there for the family's seasonal moves. Today the line still runs, electrified and ordinary, taking commuters and tourists down to the museums in less than half an hour. The Imperial Pavilion is preserved as a small museum of its own.
The Wehrmacht occupied Pushkin from September 1941 to January 1944, and the damage was catastrophic. The Catherine Palace was looted and partly burned. The Amber Room, gifted to Peter the Great by Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia in 1716, was disassembled and shipped to Königsberg, where it disappeared in the chaos of the war's end and has been the subject of treasure hunts and conspiracy theories ever since. A meticulous reconstruction of the Amber Room, using period techniques and Russian-mined Baltic amber, was completed in 2003 for the city of Saint Petersburg's tercentenary. The palaces themselves have been restored over decades — the turquoise facade rebuilt, the gilt regilded, the Great Hall's ceiling fresco repainted from photographs. Tsarskoye Selo is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site that includes the historic center of Saint Petersburg. Today buses arrive by the thousand. The gravel paths fill. The lake reflects the same Catherine Palace facade it has reflected for two and a half centuries — once an empire's symbol of itself, now a museum of a country still working out what to make of its own past.
Located at 59.723°N, 30.416°E, approximately 24 km south of central Saint Petersburg in the town of Pushkin. From altitude, look for the formal geometric park (about 600 hectares) southeast of the city and the long turquoise Catherine Palace facade. Pulkovo Airport (ULLI) is roughly 12 km to the northwest. The site sits on a low rise above the surrounding plain.