To the Russian manor born: Public gets a rare chance to walk historic halls

A huge, glittering aristocratic palace, surrounded by rambling gardens, quiet forests, and well-stocked fishing ponds was once a fairly common sight in the Russian countryside, at least in czarist times. Always nearby would be the impoverished villages of peasants who toiled on the land, provided servants for the great house, and soldiers for the czar’s army.

But a century ago, amid revolution and civil war, the owners of these extravagant estates fled, leaving their lavish homes to be burned, swallowed up by the forests, or used as stables or storehouses for collective farms.

One of those was the estate of the Kurakin family, who lived in a lavish, sprawling palace at Stepanovskoye-Volosovo for almost 200 years before that last members of the clan were evicted by the Bolsheviks in 1918. The main building was used as a mental health facility for much of the Soviet period, gradually decaying until its main wing burned

The Kurakin estate“Bigger than a piece of family property”