The Winter Palace and the People: Staging and Consuming Russia's Monarchy, 1754–1917. By Susan P. McCaffray,. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018. xii, 284 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Figures. Tables. Maps. $39.00, paper.

The Winter Palace and the People: Staging and Consuming Russia's Monarchy, 1754–1917. By Susan P. McCaffray. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018. xii, 284 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Figures. Tables. Maps. $39.00, paper.

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...