Auguste de Montferrand designed the cathedral, built from 1818 to 1858, and it was the fourth church on the site. The exterior is late Neoclassical, with a Russian-Byzantine plan: a Greek cross with a large central dome and four smaller side domes. It is faced with gray and pink stone.
The main dome rises 333 feet (101.52 m) to the top cross, and the capacity is 12,000. There are 112 red granite Corinthian columns, each cut and erected as a single block, quarried at Pyterlahti in Finland. The article gives the foundation as 25,000 piles in one place and 10,000 tree trunks in another.
The dome has a cast-iron structure and was fire-gilded using mercury, whose vapors killed sixty workers. In 1931 the building became the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism. It has remained a museum, with church services in a side chapel since the 1990s.
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