An image based Impasto artwork of the Peter and Paul fortress in St. Petersburg, “Looking Towards St. Pete,” from the fortress embankment.

The fortress was established by Peter the Great on May 16, 1703 on small Hare Island by the north bank of the Neva River, the last upstream island of the Neva delta. Built at the height of the Northern War in order to protect the projected capital from a feared Swedish counterattack. The citadel was completed with six bastions in earth and timber within a year, and it was rebuilt in stone from 1706-1740.

From around 1720, the fort served as a base for the city garrison and also as a prison for high ranking or political prisoners. The Trubetskoy bastion, rebuilt in the 1870s, became the main prison block. The first person to escape from the fortress prison was the anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin in 1876. Other people incarcerated in the “Russian Bastille” include Shneur Zalman of Liadi, Tsarevich Alexis, Artemy Volynsky, Tadeusz Kościuszko, Alexander Radishchev, the Decembrists, Grigory Danilevsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Bakunin, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Leon Trotsky and Josip Broz Tito.

During the February Revolution of 1917, it was attacked by mutinous soldiers of the Pavlovskii regiment on February 27 and the prisoners were freed. Under the Provisional Government hundreds of Tsarist officials were held in the Fortress.

The Tsar was threatened with being incarcerated at the Fortress on his return from Mogilev to Tsarskoe Selo on March 8, but the threat was not followed through and he was placed under house arrest.

On October 25, again, the Fortress quickly came into Bolshevik hands. Following the ultimatum from the Petrograd Soviet to the Provisional Government ministers in the Winter Palace, after the blank salvo of the Cruiser Aurora at 21.00, the guns of the Fortress fired 30 or so shells at the Winter Palace. Only two actually hit, inflicting minor damage, and the defenders refused to surrender– at that time. At 02.10 on the morning of October 26 the Winter Palace was taken by forces under Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, the captured ministers were taken to the Fortress as prisoners.