On 28 January 1919, four grand dukes from the House of Romanov were shot within the walls of the fortress on the orders of the Presidium of the Cheka under Felix Dzerzhinsky, Yakov Peters, Martin Latsis, and Ivan Ksenofontov.

[1] In the years before and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Peter and Paul Fortress was portrayed by Bolshevik propaganda as a hellish, torturous place, where thousands of prisoners suffered endlessly in filthy, cramped, and grossly overcrowded dungeons amid frequent torture and malnutrition.

The legends served to portray the government as cruel and indiscriminate in the administration of justice, helping to turn the common mind against Tsarist rule.

Many inmates, after being released, wrote chilling and increasingly exaggerated accounts of life there that solidified the structure's horrible image in the public mind and pushed the people further towards dissent.

Writers often purposely exaggerated their experiences to garner more hatred for the government; as writer and former Peter and Paul inmate Maksim Gorky would later state, "Every Russian who had ever sat in jail as a 'political' prisoner considered it his holy duty to bestow on Russia his memoirs of how he had suffered.

"[3] The fortress contains several buildings clustered around the Peter and Paul Cathedral (1712–1733), which has a 122.5 m (402 ft) bell-tower and a gilded angel-topped cupola.

Other structures inside the fortress include the still functioning Saint Petersburg Mint building[1] (constructed to Antonio Porta's designs under Emperor Paul I), the Trubetskoy Bastion with its grim prison cells, and the city museum.