ABSTRACT
Palace Square, designed and built in the early nineteenth century, is formed by the concave General Staff building and the rectilinear Winter Palace to the northwest. The General Staff building, like the other government buildings in the area, accommodated the new military and ministerial bureaucracy needed to run the new superpower (Egorov 1969: 85). Moreover, the square and other squares were distinctly imperial symbols of the tsar’s military power following the Napoleonic Wars. In the tradition of military showplaces, it was designed for grand ceremonies and exercises to show the Russian people and visiting dignitaries Russia’s new military might. Appropriately grand and opulent, the space is one of the largest enclosed and completely uniform urban spaces in the world.
