Today, the building of the Smolny Palace houses the government of St. Petersburg. During the October Revolution, this was the headquarters of the Bolsheviks, and before that the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens, the first women's educational institution in Russia, was located.
The cartographic collection of the Stockholm History Museum contains several maps compiled by the famous Swedish cartographer of the 14th century Karl Julius. These maps are unique not only for their extremely venerable age, but also for the fact that they quite accurately depict the old Swedish volost Ingermanlandia, that is, the territory of the modern city of St. Petersburg and most of the Leningrad region.
On the maps, the section of the Neva coast, where the Smolny building is now located, is marked with an ominous pentagram and is called a "devil's place". It also contains advice to merchants and travelers to avoid stopping at this site. The exact reason for the danger is not indicated, since people who lived in the XIV century did not need special explanations in such cases, they were quite content with a short warning.
Mentions of a bad place on the banks of the Neva are often found in the runes of the Finns and Karelians who have inhabited these lands since ancient times. In Karelian legends, the place is called the Devil's Coast.
After the founding of St. Petersburg, resin plants settled on the Devil's Bank. An extensive resin yard was built, where resin was manufactured and stored for the Admiralty shipyard and the fleet. This once again emphasized the dark aura of the place: rumors circulated among the first settlers of St. Petersburg that pitchforks knew evil spirits.
The plot of land adjacent to the Smolyaniy Dvor belonged to the daughter of Peter I, Elizabeth. A palace was built for her here, where she loved to spend the summer months. Having become an empress, Elizabeth ordered to demolish the gloomy tar distilleries. In their place, the architect Giacomo Quarenghi began the construction of a women's monastery, laying the foundation for the architectural complex of Smolny.
An old man came to tell the architect about the mysterious incidents associated with this area, but the arrogant Italian did not want to listen to him, ordering "to drive an old stump in the neck."
Subsequently, the pupils of Smolny were madly afraid, even in the daytime, to approach the empty, tightly closed wing of the institute, where a ghostly silhouette smoothly gliding was repeatedly noticed at night. The Smolyanka women were sure that this was the soul of one of the boarders, seduced by one of the sovereigns and then committed suicide. The administration of the institute did not attach much importance to conversations about ghostly visions, attributing them to ordinary girlish fears. However, it ended rather sadly.
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The institute's stoker, Efim Raspadkov, decided to show off his remarkable courage. He informed a number of senior pupils that next night he intended to enter the wing. A good half of the smolyanoks saw from their bedroom windows how the stoker walked through the yard, opened the door of the building and stepped inside. An hour passed, then another. Yefim still did not come out, and the girls were already drawn to sleep.
In the morning it turned out that the junior stoker had not fulfilled his duties and could not be found anywhere. Someone suggested the place where to look. True, the outbuilding door turned out to be locked. The rusty lock was unlocked, but Raspadkov was not found. In general, except for broken furniture and a bust of Voltaire covered with flies, nothing else was found there. And so Yefimka the stoker disappeared, without a trace and who knows where.
However, his mysterious disappearance soon ceased to worry anyone and lead to terrible thoughts. The revolutionaries from the smoky factory outskirts and sailors' quarters without much trouble threw the entire noble public out of the boarding house.
New time gave birth to new legends: in the 1920s, revolutionaries talked about the ghost of a "bourgeois" shot in Smolny. War communism was replaced by the harsh thirties, and on December 1, 1934, the first secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee of the CPSU (b) Sergei Kirov was shot dead in Smolny.
A little more than a year passed, and a rumor spread throughout the city that at night the ghost of the murdered man appeared in the corridors of the Smolny. According to legend, the head of the administrative department was the first to see him in 1935.
- He walks as if he were alive, only cold blows from him, and the back of his head, where the bullet entered, is shattered and all black with blood, - he told his friends in secret.
Stories and rumors about Kirov's ghost multiplied every day.
During the war, Kirov's ghost was seen especially often. Usually his silhouette - dark and motionless - appeared on the roof of the Smolny. At first, the figure was mistaken for a fascist paratrooper and aimed fire was fired at it. However, soon one of the security officers, through the optics of a sniper rifle, clearly saw in the reflections of the fires the characteristic Kirov comb, familiar facial features, a soldier's tunic and a wide belt.
For almost the entire war, Kirov's ghost was on the roof. Sometimes, the commander of an air defense battery defending Smolny would look up and shout to the artillery crews:
- Kirov is with us, guys! - And the anti-aircraft gunners are hitting the Nazi planes even more violently.
In the postwar years, the ghost of Kirov was seen much less often. The last time he appeared in August 1991, when, after the failure of the State Emergency Committee, the Communists left the Smolny building. Its appearance was preceded by an unexpected icy coldness, and then Sergey Mironovich himself materialized from the void.
The sight of the ghost was extremely creepy and menacing. Shaking the assembled with a huge sinewy fist, he disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared. It was so ridiculous and scary that one of the communists felt bad.
Since then, the ghost of Kirov has not appeared again. True, the honored workers of Smolny assure that he has not disappeared anywhere, he just hid for a while. They seem to know what they are talking about: old people rarely make mistakes in such matters.