If These Walls

Smolny’s repeated roles in history

The Smolny Institute is an extraordinary place, permeated with history.

Once upon a time – when St. Petersburg was first established, when the Neva was not yet lined with ornate granite embankments, when the tsar lived in a simple house that was anything but a palace – this was the outskirts of town. On the very spot where the magnificent Smolny buildings stand today, tar was produced for Peter the Great’s ships. A few decades passed, St. Petersburg grew, and the Tar Works (Smolny dvor – smola is Russian for tar) were encompassed by the growing city.

At this point, an attractive building was erected on the site: Smolny Palace. It did not look much like a palace, but this is where Tsarevna Elizabeth lived, daughter of the late Tsar Peter. The young beauty aroused the constant suspicion of her aunt, the Empress Anna Ivanovna, who saw in the direct descendent of the great emperor a threat to her own power. Legend has it that Anna’s ruthless and omnipotent favorite, Ernst Johann Biron, disguised himself as a stable hand in order to spy on Elizabeth and determine her true intentions. And here, it is said, Elizabeth first had the idea of building a refuge for such unfortunate girls as herself.

We do not know how much truth there is to these romantic tales, but the fact remains:  in 1741, after years of anticipation, Elizabeth Petrovna seized the throne; seven years later, in 1748, the renowned architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli began to build the Novodevichy Convent on the site of Smolny Palace.

But by now Elizabeth was no longer a modest, mild-mannered girl. Having finally attained power, she was sampling life’s pleasures – to make up for the years spent in disfavor and seclusion. Rastrelli built her the opulent Winter Palace in the center of town and the suburban palace in Tsarskoe Selo, glistening with gold leaf. Here, there was constant music: balls were held by the light of thousands of candles. Here, thousands of dresses were stored, each worn by Elizabeth no more than once.

At the same time, Tsarina Elizabeth often spoke of her wish to end her life in a convent. This may or may not have been sincere, but Elizabeth was known for her piety. Rastrelli, in building the convent, with its remarkable cathedral, the likes of which cannot be found anywhere else, may have assumed that Smolny would once again serve as the sovereign’s residence. The cathedral itself gave the entire convent a grandiose, majestic appearance.

But it was not to be. Elizabeth held the throne for almost 20 years, to the end of her days combining piety with a love of pleasure. Time passed, and another empress ascended the throne – Catherine. The 1760s had arrived.

Catherine the Great was an enlightened ruler, eager to surround herself with people who were equally enlightened and who would support her initiatives. Reading the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she developed ideas about how to achieve such a like-minded cohort within Russia. Children, she came to believe, should be raised away from the corrupting influences of society and given the opportunity to freely develop their inherent qualities. It was for this reason that Catherine created several closed educational institutions, among them Russia’s first such school for girls. At first, only girls from noble families were admitted, but later the school was opened to girls of the petit-bourgeoisie as well.

The Smolny Institute became the place that parents dreamed of sending their daughters. It provided both a brilliant education and wonderful social connections. True, Smolyanki were often accused of complete ignorance of the real world and a total lack of practical knowledge about running a household or an estate. But their French was impeccable, they displayed appropriate musical proficiency, they could dance, their bon ton never faltered, and every last one of them was infatuated with the Grand Prince or the Emperor, as befitted the particular period.

“It would be impossible to imagine happier circumstances than those that I experienced during my eleven years at Smolny,” recalled Glafira Rzhevskaya, the star of the Institute’s first graduating class. “The joy that I felt cannot be compared with riches, with brilliant social status, with royal favor, or with success in society.”

A few decades later, the Institute had grown and needed a new building. The rulers of the 19th century also supported enlightenment, and so, on June 11, 1806, during the reign of Catherine the Great’s grandson, Alexander I, another Italian architect, Giacomo Quarenghi, began construction of a new building for the Smolny convent. Quarenghi was put off by the lavish, at times excessive sumptuousness of Rastrelli’s baroque structure. He was a designer of severe buildings in the classical style. Nonetheless, whenever he arrived at the institute’s construction site, he always paused in front of the cathedral, repeating with emotion, “What a church! What a church!”

Quarenghi erected another masterpiece alongside the cathedral – a fine, Palladian building with a huge assembly hall, beset with geometric lines and intricately landscaped gardens. The new generation of institute girls would be living in a real palace. As before, they were taught to dance and to speak French, they were dizzied by the prospect of a royal visit, and they kept their voices at a decorous pitch as they walked the gardens in pairs.

True, not all the girls were as happy here as Glafira Rzhevskaya had been. In Smolny, where Catherine had dreamed the girls would develop in blissful freedom, enforcement of strict discipline never wavered. The matrons did not forgive even the slightest offense. Running and games were forbidden. But then who would think about running and games in such an opulent and grand setting? And so severe and cold a setting: every generation of Smolyanki complained about the cold – it was believed that too much warmth was harmful to the developing body, just like an excess of play.

“However lively and full of mischief a girl might have been when she first entered the institute,” recalled Elizabeth Vodovozova, another former Smolyanka, “the strict discipline and constant drill she was subjected to there, along with the complete absence of any compassion and affection, quickly changed a child’s character.” Vodovozova was a child of another era – the mid-nineteenth century – when girls no longer wanted to submit to strict rules and, furthermore, longed for an education with more application to real life.

With the passage of decades, times changed beyond the walls of the Institute. Political storms were raging, tsars succeeded one another, revolutionaries were active, women were fighting for and achieving rights – they were now able to attend university lectures alongside men and even to practice medicine. But at Smolny, everything was as it had been. Here, a girl had to watch her posture, walk in a quiet and orderly manner, dance gracefully, and try not to faint from joy if the emperor were suddenly to talk to her at a ball.

And then came 1917. The monarchy collapsed and the Smolny Institute became a thing of the past. Quarenghi’s building quickly found new occupants. In August 1917, the Petrograd Soviet made Smolny its headquarters. It was here that the Bolsheviks prepared to seize power.

Along the corridors where young ladies had once moved quietly under the watchful eyes of class matrons, one heard the hurried gait of Trotsky or Lenin, or the heavy step of armed sailors.

For a time after the Bolsheviks’ successful coup, Russia was ruled from Smolny. When the capital was moved to Moscow, the building was handed over to the Petrograd city government.

Years passed, and the Institute once again found itself at the center of historical events. In the early 1930s, Sergei Kirov, First Secretary of the Communist Party’s Leningrad Oblast Committee and a figure close to Stalin, had his offices at Smolny. It was here, on December 1, 1934, that a worker by the name Nikolayev somehow managed to get past security, make his way to Kirov’s office, and fatally shoot the Party boss. Was it a murder driven by jealousy? Was Nikolayev insane? Or, as most historians believe, did Stalin use Nikolayev to get rid of Kirov, who was becoming too popular? Many others were soon to meet Kirov’s fate. His murder marked the start of what would come to be known as The Great Terror.

If they could talk, the walls of Smolny could probably tell us much about this and many other mysteries of the past. But today all is peaceful there. The institute building houses the St. Petersburg city government. Tourists are brought here to admire Rastrelli’s and Quarenghi’s architectural masterpieces. Communists come from time to time to leave flowers at the foot of Lenin’s statue and to give loud speeches recalling the glories of 1917. For now, history stands still at Smolny... but for how long?