Tsarskoye Selo

'Tsar's Village') was the town containing a former residence of the Russian imperial family and visiting nobility, located 24 kilometers (15 mi) south from the center of Saint Petersburg.

Tsarskoye Selo forms one of the World Heritage Site Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments.

At the edge of the great St. Petersburg plain, fifteen miles south of the capital, a succession of Russian tsars and empresses had created an isolated, miniature world, as artificial and fantastic as a precisely ordered mechanical toy.

Inside the park, monuments, obelisks and triumphal arches studded eight hundred acres of velvet green lawn.

At one end of the lake stood a pink Turkish bath; not far off, a dazzling red-and-gold Chinese pagoda crowned an artificial hillock."

"Outside the palace gates, Tsarskoe Selo, was an elegant provincial town..." The town included "The mansions of the aristocracy, lining the wide tree-shaded boulevard which led from the railway station to the gates of the Imperial Park..."[3]In the decades of the Soviet Union, people applied the nickname "the Tsar's village" to the blocks and small neighborhoods in major cities that housed the nomenklatura (Soviet elites).