In 1871, the Paris Communards avenged themselves on monarchy by setting fire to the Louvre and the adjacent Tuileries Palace. This suggests a question that we do not often ask: in 1917, why did the Winter Palace and the Hermitage not burn? Why did the Bolsheviks think of them as belonging to the people, not the tsars? What can this tell us about continuities in culture and civic identity across Russia's revolutionary divide?

Susan McCaffray provides an answer in this excellent and highly readable book. The Romanovs, she argues, built the palace and the museum as a stage on which to enact the “scenarios of power” that Richard Wortman described in his groundbreaking book. In the eighteenth century era of palace coups, the target audience was the court; later, in Europe's Age of Revolution, it was the people of the city. McCaffray goes beyond Wortman to explore how the audience responded to the “scenarios.” Her argument is that they accepted the claim that the palace and the adjacent square were the center of Russia's civic and cultural life, but as “society” and “the people” grew more assertive, they began taking control of these spaces, while the monarchy withdrew from them. Hence, when the monarchy was finally swept away, the palace was easily absorbed into the post-revolutionary order.

The book is divided into three parts. The first focuses on the site's origin in the 18th eighteenth century. The palace was mostly built under Elizabeth, who wanted a grand setting to impress her courtiers. Once it became clear that the new palace would face the city, not the river or the Admiralty, Catherine II developed the adjacent meadow into Palace Square. She also built the Hermitage art collection and gave limited access to it to the public. The palace was still mainly a political site for the court, but the square gave it an interface with the city, and the art gallery meant that alongside its political function, it acquired a cultural one as well.

The French Revolution complicated the regime's calculations by showing that danger could arise from the common people. Part two examines how the monarchy responded. Paul and Alexander I groped for a solution that Nicholas I eventually perfected. Nicholas sought to instill conservative values in the people of his capital—most of whom, McCaffray points out, were poor, single, potentially volatile young men—by modeling the behavior of a proper lord and family man. Parades and monuments on Palace Square brought monarchist sentiments to the people. Inside the palace, Nicholas was a benign patriarch to the masses of artisans, servants, soldiers, and other palace staff. The boundary between palace and city was porous: palace workers went out into the city, while thousands of city folk came to palace festivities. The stability of Nicholas's regime, McCaffray suggests, probably owed something to the success of this symbolic outreach.

Why the regime eventually failed, but the Winter Palace survived, is the subject of part three. Basically, the monarchy lost control of Russia's premier public space. This first became apparent in the Hermitage. Opened by Nicholas I to the general public, it was taken over by art experts who saw themselves not as servants of monarchy, but as educators of the people and guardians of the nation's artistic heritage. The palace became a center for the arts, but under the control of society rather than the tsar. As a stage for the monarchy, meanwhile, it atrophied. Alexander II stopped inviting the public, downsized the staff, and failed to update the symbolism of monarchy for the era of the Great Reforms, even as the surrounding city grew too large to be dominated by the palace. The last two tsars preferred to live elsewhere; they created no new focal point for civic life, but only accelerated their own estrangement from it. On Bloody Sunday, the workers wanted to speak to their tsar, so they marched to the country's paramount civic space, Palace Square; when the tsar failed to meet them there, their bond with him was shattered. The palace never lost its role as an artistic hub, however, and when it briefly regained a political role in 1917, it was as a center of revolutionary politics. The culture and civic identity that the imperial regime had fostered thus survived into the Soviet era.