Empress Elizaveta Petrovna commissioned the palace from Bartolomeo Rastrelli. Construction started in 1744, and the palace was completed in 1752 by Rastrelli's student Ivan Michurin and a group of other architects. The article describes the style as Elizabethan Baroque.
In the early 19th century the palace burned in a series of fires and was abandoned for almost half a century. Alexander II had it reconstructed in 1870 by Konstantin Mayevsky, using old drawings and watercolors as guides.
In 1917 to 1920 it served as the Kyiv revkom headquarters. In the 1920s it belonged to an agricultural school and then became a museum. It was badly damaged in World War II and restored at the end of the 1940s, and another major restoration was completed in the early 1980s. Reconstruction began in June 2007 and was still ongoing as of 2017. It is the official residence of the president of Ukraine.
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