Anichkov Palace

The Anichkov Palace stands at 39 Nevsky Prospekt, by the bridge that gave it its name, and is considered the oldest surviving building on this street.

Construction began in 1741 by order of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, who had come to power through a coup. The design for this multi-storey building, shaped like an elongated letter "H", was created by the architect Mikhail Zemtsov; after his death in 1743 the work was completed by Bartolomeo Rastrelli. In those decades the Fontanka marked the edge of the city, and Nevsky Prospekt was still no more than a cleared track, so the palace was meant to mark the entrance to the capital — a canal was dug from the river to it, ending in a small harbour by the entrance; hence the building's unusual position, standing sideways to the avenue. Having received the building, the empress gave it to her favourite, Alexei Razumovsky.

The palace subsequently changed hands repeatedly as a wedding gift. Catherine II bought it back from the brother of its previous owner and gave it to Count Potemkin to be refurbished "to his own taste." In 1776–1778 the architect Ivan Starov reworked the building in a Classicist spirit: the facade's differing floor heights were removed, the stucco decoration taken down, and the harbour filled in — the appearance became stricter, but also more uniform. By the end of the 18th century the building was bought back by the treasury and given over to the Department of the Imperial Cabinet; for its needs the architect Giacomo Quarenghi added two independent blocks on the river side, which later concealed the palace's facade from the Anichkov Bridge.

In 1817 Alexander I gave the building as a wedding present to his brother, the future Nicholas I. The reconstruction of the estate was overseen by the engineer Augustin de Betancourt, who brought in the architects Alexander Modyui and Carlo Rossi; Modyui incorporated the palace garden into the ensemble of the square in front of the Alexandrinsky Theatre, enclosed it with a fence, and set up two pavilions on its western side. Later, fearing assassination attempts, Alexander III made his home here, and a blank wall was built facing the square during his reign; after his death, his widow, Maria Feodorovna, continued to live in the palace. Among those raised within its walls was also the future Alexander II, whose Russian-language tutor was the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, a friend of Pushkin's, who had his own quarters here.

After the revolution the building was briefly occupied by a city museum, and from February 1937 it housed the Leningrad Palace of Pioneers — today the Palace of Youth Creativity and the Anichkov Lyceum. In the autumn of 1941 a surgical hospital was set up within its walls, treating the wounded throughout the first winter of the siege. A birch tree grows by the main facade: it was planted, in different years, by the cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov and German Titov.