Last Updated on February 22, 2023 by Hannah Henderson
A dazzling summer palace and the empresses who made it their own
Just as splendid as Peterhof, the Catherine Palace is St Petersburg’s other glittering summer residence, built as a surprise for Peter the Great by his wife Catherine on land he had gifted to her. This episode tells the story of the two great empresses who made it their own, starting with Elizabeth, daughter of Peter and Catherine and moving on to her niece-in-law, another Catherine, who succeeded to the Russian throne after the timely, not to say highly convenient, sudden death of her husband Peter III. She ruled for over thirty years as Catherine the Great. Learn something of the lives both empresses lived in the Catherine Palace, and then hear a few pointers on what to look out for on a visit.
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More information about St Petersburg coming soon.
Listen to the POdcast
Links & Reading
Useful websites for tourists
St Petersburg City Tourist Information Bureau
St Petersburg.Com (Tourist Information)
2 guidebooks to St Petersburg
Eyewitness Travel Guide to St Petersburg
Lonely Planet Guide to St Petersburg
Travel Book
Among the Russians by Colin Thubron
History
Russian History, a Very Short Introduction by Geoffrey Hosking
The Romanovs by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Caught in the Revolution by Helen Rappaport
Biography
Peter the Great by Lindsey Hughes
Peter the Great by Derek Wilson
Catherine the Great by Simon Dixon
Catherine the Great by Robert K Massie
Rasputin by Frances Welch
Four Sisters by Helen Rappaport (the 4 daughters of Czar Nicholas II)
The Diary of Lena Mukhina (A diary of the Siege of Leningrad)
Art and Culture
A Short Life of Pushkin by Robert Chandler
Nijinsky by Lucy Moore
Rudolf Nuryev The Life by Julie Kavanagh
Anna of all the Russias The Life of Anna Akhmatova by Elaine Feinstein
Anthologies
St Petersburg A Traveller’s Companion by Laurence Kelly
City Pick St Petersburg edited by Heather Reyes
Literary St Petersburg by Elaine Blair
Novels set in St Petersburg
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Siege by Helen Dunmore
The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore
The Suitcase by Sergei Dovlatov
