Governor’s Palace

The Governor’s Palace is a historic building within the Kazan Kremlin that served as the residence of the Kazan governors and today houses the residence of the head of Tatarstan. The palace was built in the mid-19th century to a design by the St Petersburg architect Konstantin Ton and forms a single ensemble with the Palace Church and the gate tower, erected in the same years.

In earlier times the site of the future palace held the palace of the Kazan khans, and in the 18th century the house of the fortress’s chief commandant. The new building was conceived as the residence of the military governor, with chambers for imperial visits; the design was approved personally by Nicholas I in 1843, who entrusted the work to Konstantin Ton, the same architect who had shortly before designed the Grand Kremlin Palace and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. On site, construction was overseen by the military governor Stepan Shipov: he entrusted the key role of builder to an engineer named Malthe, assisted by the architect Alexander Peske, while Mikhail Korinfsky was responsible for the interior décor. It is known that Shipov wanted to orient the main façade towards the Kazanka River, but the emperor did not approve the idea.

The two-storey building, with a mezzanine and a basement level, combines Russo-Byzantine style with motifs of pseudo-Renaissance. The main façade is organised around a projecting risalit with paired half-columns on the second tier, crowned by a pediment of three arches; entry is through two porches with arched openings and columns. The décor mixes features of several eras at once: the rustication of the ground floor and paired pilasters recall the Renaissance, the entablature above the columns of the main risalit recalls the Baroque, while the pendant ‘giryki’ ornaments above the second-floor windows and the shaped supports of the side passage to the Palace Church recall Old Russian architecture. The top of the risalit deliberately echoes the shape of the kokoshnik gables of the Annunciation Cathedral standing on the other side of the courtyard.

In the 20th century the palace housed the supreme organs of power of the Tatar ASSR — the presidium of the Supreme Soviet and the republic’s Council of Ministers — so the building remained, almost without interruption, the centre of regional government even after the overthrow of the gubernatorial system. With the formation of modern Tatarstan, it once again became the residence of the region’s first person, this time the head of the republic.

The ensemble has been thoroughly restored twice — in the 1970s and around the turn of the 2000s — and in the late 1990s a fence was installed around the palace in keeping with its current status as a working state residence. The building is closed to the general public, but its façade with its recognisable risalit remains one of the key points in the Kremlin’s panorama, seen by everyone who walks across Kremlin Square.

Designed by the same architect as the principal residence of the Moscow emperors, Kazan’s Governor’s Palace linked this city on the Volga with the pan-Russian architectural fashion of the mid-19th century, without losing its own role in the life of the republic.