History

On 30 October 1837, a steam locomotive named Provorny (‘Swift’) pulled the first train in Russia out of a modest timber station on this site, carrying Tsar Nicholas I and his court the 23 kilometres south to Tsarskoye Selo. That inaugural journey placed Saint Petersburg — and the Russian Empire — into the age of steam. The architect Konstantin Ton designed the original wooden terminus in the summer of 1837; a permanent stone replacement followed in 1849–51, reconstructed again in the 1870s.

By the turn of the twentieth century the station was handling far more traffic than its Victorian fabric could bear. In 1902, the engineer Stanislav Antonovich Brzozowski (1863–c.1930s) received the commission to design an entirely new building in the fashionable Style Moderne idiom then sweeping Europe. Brzozowski gave the two-storey exterior a bold silhouette: a pseudo-Renaissance dome above the central hall, a tall square clock tower, outsize semicircular windows flooding the concourse with light, and façade panels of floriate Jugendstil relief work that ripple like Art Nouveau metalwork frozen in stone.

The interior commission went to the architect Sima Isaakovich Minash (1877–1945), whose work here is widely regarded as the finest station interior in the city. Minash’s great hall soars more than twenty metres high, its walls covered with painted panels by Nikolai Samokish and Ekaterina Samokish-Sudkovskaya depicting scenes from the Tsarskoye Selo Railway — Russia’s first line — from 1837 to the early twentieth century. The main staircase ascends beneath marble banisters inlaid with bronze; the foyer is lit through stained-glass windows whose organic lead lines echo the station’s botanical reliefs outside. The building opened in 1904 and was immediately recognised as the most ornate of Saint Petersburg’s five great termini.

In 1987, to mark the 150th anniversary of Russian railways, a glass pavilion was installed on the platform holding a replica of the Provorny locomotive and passenger coaches of the 1837 type. The station continues to operate under Russian Railways (RZhD), serving lines south to Pushkin (Tsarskoye Selo), Pavlovsk, and international routes toward Vitebsk and Minsk — the Belarusian connection that gave the building its present name.