Inside the Alexander Palace

St Petersburg, 1905-1917

the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo was commissioned by Empress Catherine the

Great in 1792 as a wedding present for her favourite grandson, Grand Duke Alexander. Designed as a gracious summer palace in the fashionable neo-classical style with a graceful peristyle entrance, it would become a favourite residence of the imperial family. On 18 May 1868, the future Nicholas II was born in the palace and the palace would pass into his hands after his father became Tsar Alexander III in 1881.

Although the Tsar and his family usually resided in the much larger and grander Catherine Palace, Nicholas was so fond of the Alexander Palace that he decided to make the home of the heir his primary residence after his accession.

When the violent events of Bloody Sunday in 1904 made it unwise for the Imperial family to continue living in the Winter Palace in the heart of St Petersburg, they made the Alexander Palace their permanent residence. The couple transformed the palace into a family home for themselves and their five children, installing heating, electricity, phone lines and a lift.

Both Nicholas and Alexandra felt uncomfortable in the magnificent, gilt encrusted interiors of the Russian royal palaces and preferred a more cosy, intimate English style that reminded Alexandra of her childhood visits to her grandmother, Queen Victoria. The sophisticated courtiers mocked her for ordering simple furniture from England and covering everything in floral patterned chintz, but Nicholas and Alexandra didn’t care as they retreated further away from the court and hid themselves away in the domestic paradise that they had created for themselves and their children.

However, their happy family home became a prison in March 1917. After Nicholas abdicated his throne, they remained there, guarded and increasingly cut off from the outside world, until August when they were sent into exile in Siberia.