History of Pushkin

Just twenty-five kilometers south of Saint Petersburg lies a town whose history is a rare case of a modest Finnish manor turning into a ceremonial imperial residence, and then into a town named after the great poet. Pushkin’s fate is closely tied to the Saint Petersburg court: for nearly two centuries it was “written” by architects, empresses, and gardeners, and in the twentieth century — by soldiers and restorers.

Saari Manor and the first palace

The lands on which the present-day town stands were already recorded in Swedish cadastres as “Sarishoff” — from the Finnish *saari* (“island,” “elevated place”). On Russian maps the name became “Saritsa,” and later “Sarskaya Manor.” In the autumn of 1702, when Peter I retook Ingria from the Swedes, the manor first passed to Alexander Menshikov, and on June 24, 1710, it was granted to Marta Skavronskaya, the future Catherine I. This date is considered the founding day of the town.

Construction of the first palace here began only eight years later. In 1718–1724, the architect Johann Braunstein built for Catherine a modest — by today’s standards — two-story “stone house of sixteen chambers.” At the same time, a regular garden was laid out around it — a prototype of the future Catherine Park. The place itself gradually took on a Russified name: first Saarskoye, then Tsarskoye Selo.

The residence truly flourished under Peter’s daughter. Upon ascending the throne, Elizabeth Petrovna wished for a country residence no worse than European ones. From 1743 onward, the palace was rebuilt several times by Mikhail Zemtsov, Andrei Kvasov, and Savva Chevakinsky. Its final appearance was given to the ensemble by Bartolomeo Rastrelli: in 1752–1756 he demolished most of the earlier buildings and raised in their place an enormous azure-and-white edifice with gilded caryatids. It was then, in 1755, that the Amber Cabinet — a gift from the Prussian King Frederick William I to Peter I — was moved here from the Winter Palace. At Tsarskoye Selo it became the famous Amber Room.

The age of Catherine and the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum

With the accession of Catherine II, Tsarskoye Selo ceased to be merely a ceremonial stage. The Empress preferred to live here for several months a year and personally directed the alterations. To the already established regular garden was added a picturesque English park with the Great Pond, the Chesme and Morea Columns, and the Kagul Obelisk — monuments to recent victories over Turkey. At Catherine’s invitation, the Scotsman Charles Cameron and the Italian Giacomo Quarenghi arrived here. The former built the Cameron Gallery, the Agate Rooms, and the Cold Bath; the latter — the Alexander Palace, completed in 1796 for the future Emperor Alexander I.

In 1780, by Catherine’s decree, a separate district town of Sophia was laid out to the south of the residence — with a Sophia Cathedral designed by Charles Cameron, barracks, and a regular grid of streets. It did not last long: in 1808, Alexander I abolished Sophia and merged it with the palace settlement into a single town of Tsarskoye Selo, which became the district center of Saint Petersburg Governorate. The Sophia Cathedral, inspired by Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia, has survived to this day as a rare example of early Russian Classicism.

Three years after this merger, on October 19, 1811, the Imperial Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum — a school for training future statesmen — opened in a specially fitted wing of the Catherine Palace. The first intake consisted of thirty boys, among them the twelve-year-old Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Pushchin, Anton Delvig, and Wilhelm Küchelbecker. For all six years, until 1817, they lived in the Lyceum’s cells. Later Pushkin himself would write of that time: “Our Fatherland is Tsarskoye Selo.” The date of the Lyceum’s opening became fixed in the Russian calendar and is still marked in the town to this day.

Through the first half of the nineteenth century, Tsarskoye Selo continued to grow as a summer capital. Nicholas I personally oversaw the rebuilding; in 1827–1830, the architect Adam Menelaws installed the cast-iron Egyptian Gates at the southern entrance, which became a landmark of the town. And in 1837, the first passenger railway in the Russian Empire was laid here from Saint Petersburg — twenty-five versts of track, and the locomotive ran from Zagorodny Prospekt to Tsarskoye Selo in about thirty-five minutes. It is this line, and not the Nicholas Line between Saint Petersburg and Moscow, that is considered the forerunner of the Russian railways.

From electric lamps to the last residence

By the end of the nineteenth century, Tsarskoye Selo had become an exemplary well-appointed district town. It was among the first in Europe to have its streets lit by electricity: in 1887, its own power station began operating here. Following the arrival of electric light, the town gained running water, sewers, a telephone exchange, gymnasiums, and a well-developed dacha infrastructure. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the population of Tsarskoye Selo had reached thirty thousand.

A new chapter in the town’s history began in 1905, when Nicholas II finally moved his family to the Alexander Palace. Next to the residence, the Feodorovsky Sovereign’s Cathedral was built — a masterpiece in the style of seventeenth-century Muscovite ornament, which became the Romanovs’ house church. Here the imperial family lived for twelve years, until March 1917, when, after the abdication of Nicholas II, the palace became the site of their house arrest. In August of that year the family was sent into exile in Tobolsk.

The change of power did not spare the name either. On November 7, 1918, Tsarskoye Selo was renamed Detskoye Selo of Uritsky: orphanages, sanatoriums, and children’s homes were opened in the palaces and mansions. The parks were declared open to the public, and part of the halls of the Catherine Palace was turned into museums and dormitories. Almost two decades passed this way. On February 10, 1937, on the centenary of the poet’s death, the town received its present name — Pushkin. And although the Lyceum had long since been closed by then, it was from this moment on that the Pushkin theme became central to the life of the town.

War and the return to stone

On September 17, 1941, German troops reached the southern suburbs of Leningrad. Pushkin found itself under occupation, which lasted until January 24, 1944. Only a small part of the treasures of the Catherine Palace could be evacuated: the Amber Room, deemed too fragile for transport, was merely covered with paper and gauze. Soon the German command dismantled it and took it to Königsberg, where in 1945 the trail of the masterpiece was lost for good. By the time of liberation, the town lay in ruins: two-thirds of the center had burned out, the Lyceum, the Gostiny Dvor, and dozens of historic dachas had been destroyed, and the palace buildings had been reduced to shells.

Restoration stretched over decades. While the parks began to be put in order as early as 1946, the first six halls of the palace opened to visitors only in 1959. By the 1970s, the main interiors by Rastrelli had been restored, while the re-creation of the Amber Room became a grand project that stretched over a quarter of a century — from 1979 to 2003. At the ceremonial opening, timed to the 300th anniversary of Saint Petersburg, Vladimir Putin and Gerhard Schröder were present: the participation of the German side became a symbolic act of reconciliation and the restoration of historical justice.

In 1990, the Tsarskoye Selo ensemble was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. Today more than one hundred thousand people live in Pushkin, and the cultural life of the town is centered on the Catherine and Alexander Palaces, as well as on the Martial Chamber — the only museum of the First World War in Russia. The town remains true to its calling: it is still not so much an independent administrative center as a ceremonial Petersburg façade, turned toward its parks and its great past.