Constantine Palace

In 1918 Ilya Repin, the best-known Russian realist painter of his day, was living at his house in Kuokkala on the Gulf of Finland, which Finnish independence had just put on the far side of a new border from Petrograd. That year he painted Bolsheviks, in which a Red Army soldier takes bread from a child. The picture now hangs in the Constantine Palace at Strelna, on the southern shore of the same gulf.

The palace began as Peter the Great's plan for a seaside residence in the 1720s and takes its name from Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich, a son of Emperor Paul I, who owned it. Its contents were dispersed after 1917, and in the Second World War Strelna lay on the front line and the building was left a shell. It was rebuilt for St Petersburg's 300th anniversary in 2003 as a state residence, the Palace of Congresses, which still hosts summits.

The art came in 2007. The cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, had been stripped of Soviet citizenship in 1978 and spent some 30 years abroad collecting Russian paintings, porcelain and decorative art. Days before Sotheby's was to auction the collection in London, the businessman Alisher Usmanov bought it whole and gave it to the palace, where more than 450 objects, Repin's works among them, are shown on guided tours.