Winius began to trade in Russia in 1627. He was granted a patent (zhalovannaya gramota) for trade in the Russian interior in 1631 and exported 100,000 chetverti of Treasury grain the same year. In 1632 Winius, together with his brother Abraham and his partner Julius Willeken, were authorized to build an iron mill in the Tula district. The partners admitted Peter Marselis and Thomas de Swaen to their company and were given a ten-year monopoly on iron and weapons production. The water-driven Tula works was the first industrial iron producer in Russia.
Following a petition, Winius received a new patent in 1634 for trade, with improved conditions, and was appointed gost (privileged merchant). In the same year, Winius moved with his family to Moscow. The Tula partnership appears to have disintegrated by 1638; in 1639 Winius and Marselis, together with Thielman Akkema, became the holders of the charter of privilege. The new arrangement lasted until 1647, by which time a serious conflict arose between Winius and his partners. In 1648 Marselis and Akkema took control of the ironworks. Winius, in contrast, withdrew from iron production altogether. The same year, he petitioned to become a Russian subject. As compensation for his losses in Tula, Winius was granted a monopoly on tar production and trade, which he held between 1649 and 1654. He enjoyed the exclusive right to produce tar in the Northern Dvina and Sukhona valleys.
In 1652 Winius and his second wife, Gertrud Meyer (married in 1648), converted to Orthodoxy and became Russian subjects. In 1653 Winius and Ivan Yeremeyev Marsov were dispatched by the tsar to the Netherlands to acquire weapons, munitions, and woollen cloth for uniforms, as well as to hire military officers for service in the Muscovite army. They sold Treasury grain and potash to finance these purchases. Winius returned to Russia in 1654. He served as a diplomatic representative of the Russian government in the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany.
Winius’s eldest son Andreas (known as Andrei Andreyevich Vinius) served as an interpreter at the Diplomatic Chancellery as of 1664. He was sent to France, Spain, and England for diplomatic service from 1672 to 1674. He served in the Apothecary Chancellery from 1677 to 1689. He was ennobled
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in 1685 and headed the diplomatic postal service thereafter. Deputy head of the Diplomatic Chancellery from 1689 to 1695, he was appointed Duma Secretary in 1695. He headed the Siberian Chancellery from 1697 to 1703 and the Artillery Chancellery as of 1701, and built iron mills on the Urals. He was dismissed from government service in 1703 for embezzlement and delay in supplying the army. He escaped to the Netherlands in 1706 but, pardoned by Peter I, returned to Russia in 1708. He translated foreign books about military matters and technology and was an important bibliophile and art collector. He died in 1717. See also: FOREIGN TRADE; GOSTI; MERCHANTS
Fuhrmann, Joseph T. (1972). The Origins of Capitalism in Russia: Industry and Progress in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.
The institution of the Winter Palace dates from the first decade of St. Petersburg’s existence, when the first Winter House was constructed for Peter I in 1711. With the transfer of the capital from Moscow in 1712, the winter residence of the tsar-emperor acquired the status of a major state building. The next Winter Palace was built on the Neva River embankment in 1716-1719 to a plan by Georg Mattarnovi and was expanded in the 1720s by Domenico Trezzini. In 1732 Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli began work at the command of Empress Anna on a third version of the Winter Palace, which was under construction for much of the 1730s.
The planning of a new Winter Palace for Empress Elizabeth began in the early 1750s under the direction of Rastrelli, who intended to incorporate the existing third Winter Palace into the design of a still larger structure. However, as work proceeded in 1754, he concluded that the new palace would require not simply an expansion of the old, but would have to be built over its foundations. Construction continued year round despite the severe winters, and the empress-who viewed the palace as a matter of state prestige during the Seven Years’ War (1756- 1763)-continued to issue orders for
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
its rapid completion. The 859,555 rubles originally allotted for construction of the Winter Palace were to be drawn, in a scheme devised by the courtier Pyotr Shuvalov, from the revenues of state-licensed taverns. (Most of Rastrelli’s army of laborers earned a monthly wage of one ruble.) Cost overruns were chronic, and work was occasionally halted for lack of materials and money at a time when Russia’s resources were strained to the limit by the Seven Years’ War. Ultimately the project cost some 2,500,000 rubles, drawn from alcohol and salt taxes placed on an already burdened population. Elizabeth did not live to see the completion of the palace: She died on December 25, 1761. The main state rooms and imperial apartments were ready the following year for Tsar Peter III and his wife Catherine.
The basic plan of the Winter Palace consists of a quadrilateral with an interior courtyard decorated in a manner similar to the outer walls. The exterior facades of the new imperial palace-three of which are turned toward public spaces-were decorated in a late baroque style. On the Neva River facade the palace presents, from a distance, an uninterrupted horizontal sweep of more than 200 meters, while the opposite facade (on Palace Square) is marked in the center by the three arches of the main courtyard entrance-immortalized by the film director Sergei Eisenstein as well as by artists who portrayed, in exaggerated form, the “storming of the Winter Palace.” The facade overlooking the Admiralty is the one area of the structure that contains substantial elements of the third Winter Palace.
A strict symmetry reigns over the facades. Two hundred fifty columns segment some seven hundred windows, not including those of the interior court. The palace has three main floors situated over a basement level, and the structure culminates in an elaborate cornice supporting 176 large ornamental vases and allegorical statues. The original stone statuary, corroded by Petersburg’s harsh climate, was replaced in the 1890s by copper figures. The sandy color that Rastrelli intended for the stucco facade has vanished under a series of paints ranging from dull red (applied in the late nineteenth century) to turquoise in the early twenty-first century.
The interior of the Winter Palace, with its more than seven hundred rooms, has undergone many changes, and little of Rastrelli’s rococo decoration has survived. Work on the interior continued for several decades, as rooms were changed and
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The Marshals’ Salon displays the ornate decor typical of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. THE ART ARCHIVE/BIBLIOTH?QUE DES ARTS D?CORATIFS PARIS/DAGLI ORTI. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION. refitted to suit the tastes of Catherine the Great and her successors. Still more damaging was the 1837 palace fire that burned unchecked for more than two days and destroyed the interior. During the reconstruction most of the rooms were decorated in eclectic styles of the mid-nineteenth century or restored to the neoclassical style used by Rastrelli’s successors in decorating the palace, such as Gia-como Quarenghi. Only the main, or Jordan, staircase and the corridor leading to it (the Rastrelli Gallery) were restored by Vasily Stasov in a manner close to Rastrelli’s original design. Yet the Winter Palace remains associated above all with the name of Rastrelli, the creator of this baroque masterpiece.
In 1918 the Winter Palace and its art collection were nationalized, and in 1922 most of the building became part of the State Hermitage Museum. Substantial restoration work was interrupted by the outbreak of war, during which the museum staff performed heroically. The State Hermitage Museum reopened in 1945, and since that time the former Winter Palace has become the object of scrupulous preservation efforts devoted to one of the world’s greatest museums.
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See also: ELIZABETH; FRENCH INFLUENCE IN RUSSIA; MUSEUM, HERMITAGE; RASTRELLI, BARTOLOMEO;
