Overview
The Winter Palace stands on the Neva River embankment in central St Petersburg, Russia. Peter the Great founded the city in 1703; after intermediate palaces, Empress Elizabeth commissioned Bartolomeo Rastrelli's Baroque masterpiece (1754–1762), a facade nearly a kilometre long with hundreds of rooms, gilded state apartments, and the Jordan Staircase where courtiers greeted the tsar on feast days.
Catherine the Great added the Small Hermitage (1764) to house her art collection — the nucleus of what became the State Hermitage Museum, one of the world's largest museums. Nicholas I rebuilt interiors after the 1837 fire. The palace witnessed the 1905 Bloody Sunday massacre on Palace Square and the Bolshevik storming of 25 October 1917 that toppled the Provisional Government.
The Romanovs abandoned it for the Alexander Palace after 1905, but the building remained the revolution's symbolic target. Today the state rooms and Hermitage galleries display imperial decor alongside Egyptian, Renaissance, and modern collections. UNESCO listed the "Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg" in 1990. Pair with Palace of Versailles for contrasting Baroque absolutist residences.