Tsarskoe Selo > Destruction of the palace

The war evacuation of the collections and the destruction of the palace

The evacuation of museum artefacts from the suburban palaces near Leningrad began immediately after Germany declared war against the USSR. At that time, the palaces of Pushkin town contained 106,74г exhibits (54,154' in the Catherine Palace and 52,588 in the Alexander Palace).

The rescue of the museum collections was carried out in three stages. They were transported to Gorky on the Volga, Novosibirsk in West Siberia and Sarapul on the Kama River in Udmurtia. It was a hard work for the personnel, mainly comprised of women who packed wooden boxes, loaded and shipped the priceless items deep into the country — first of all, paintings and pieces of decorative and applied arts. The last train with the artefacts went east on August 23,1941, but the museum still tried to save whatever possible. What could not be evacuated was carefully packed and moved to the palace cellars to prevent bombardment damage. Since that time and up to September 15 the packaged artefacts were moved to Leningrad only, where they were kept in the basements of St Isaacs Cathedral throughout the siege of the city. A total of 12,021 items were evacuated from the Pushkin palaces between June 22 and September 16,1941.

The museum personnel also preserved historical archives, drafts, designs, photographs, watercolours of the palace interiors, sketches of the park and monuments. 34 marble sculptures, the monument of Alexander Pushkin, the Girl with a Pitcher and the Niobe statues from the Maids of Honour Garden were buried in the park.

No one expected the enemy to seize the town. The museum personnel primarily tried to preserve the palace s architectural and decorative elements. Therefore, the parquet floors were covered with carpet runners and strewed with sand, all the glass was glued with cigarette tissue and cloth. In August 1941, half of the windows in the Golden Enfilade were hammered with boards from the outside. The Amber Room was to be evacuated, but the amber facing started to crumble during anat- tempt to remove one of the amber panels from the wall. To save the precious piece of art from destruction, it was decided to preserve the panels on the site. They were additionally glued with gauze and padded with batting sheets. The windows were cased with two layers of boards filled up with sand. Besides the priceless Amber Room there also remained the mother-of-pearl inlaid doors and parquet in the Lyons Hall, Wedgewood biscuit bas-reliefs in Catherine H’s bedchamber, the icons of the palace chapel and unique 18th-century silks.

When the front line reached Pushkin at dawn on September 16, the last members of the museum personnel — Vera Lemus, Tamara Popova and Eugenia Turova — left the town and walked to Leningrad under persistent fire.

On September 17,1941, the units of a German police division entered Pushkin. The occupation lasted until January 24,1944.

In mid-January 1944, Soviet troops liberated Leningrad and its suburbs after a decisive assault. Masses of ruins, rocks and ashes, burned walls and complete devastation inside buildings appeared to soldiers on January 24,1944, when they entered Pushkin. In once luxurious halls of the Catherine Palace, breaches in the collapsed floors gaped under the open sky. Only 10 of 55 unique halls partially escaped fire, but they too were a terrible sight: misshapen floors and ceilings, fragments of decor. Nothing was saved from the Amber Room: the parquetry, plafond, paintings and gilt carvings were ruined. Luckily, 11 Nazi aircraft bombs set up in the Catherine Palace, in the basement of the Cameron Gallery and in the park pavilions, were immediately found and neutralized.

Only about 20 buildings escaped fire in Pushkin and the rest were burnt to the ground.