The Winter Palace looks straight out of a fairytale in this image taken in the snow from St Isaac’s Cathedral in St Petersburg.

The stunning Baroque building on the banks of the River Neva was the official residence of the Russian tsars until the Russian Revolution in 1917 when it was ransacked by the Bolsheviks and eventually turned into a museum.

The iconic residence was such an important landmark that no structure in St Petersburg was allowed to overshadow it for some 200 years. Strict height restrictions, which were removed in the 1960s, says World Atlas, were imposed which prohibited the construction of buildings that would exceed the height of the historic residence.

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