William Heste

He came to Russia in 1784 with a group of 73 Scottish craftsmen hired in Edinburgh[2] by Charles Cameron to work on construction sites in Tsarskoe Selo.

[4] Hastie never returned to Scotland, and instead in 1792 he entered the service of the Russian Imperial Chancellery, designing model buildings for mass construction.

In July 1795 he joined the Yekaterinoslav Governorate administration as its chief architect; in particular, in the Crimea Hastie surveyed the Bakhchisaray Palace and other Tatar and Greek relics.

Hastie left the southern provinces in June 1799, but returned to their architecture in the 1810s, producing a master plan for the redevelopment of Yekaterinoslav, which was approved in 1817 and generally followed throughout the 19th century.

After serving in Yekaterinoslav Governorate, he came back to Saint Petersburg in 1803, and joined Charles Gascoigne as his assistant on the construction site of the Izhorsky Zavod.