There is a museum in St. Petersburg holding one of the largest art collections on the planet, and roughly fifty cats work there. Not strays hanging around the loading dock. Actual staff. They have paperwork.
I went down this rabbit hole a few years ago and never really climbed back out. I have been running a cat site since 2009, which means I have read an unreasonable amount of cat content, most of it recycled from other cat content. The Russia story is different. It is genuinely one of the strangest and most moving relationships between a country and an animal I have ever come across, and large parts of it are documented history rather than internet folklore.
Some of it is folklore, though. I will tell you which parts as we go, because half the articles about the Hermitage cats repeat things nobody can actually source. I would rather say "this is the story people tell" than pretend I found a document.
The Hermitage Cats Are Real, and They Have Papers
Start with the present day, because the present day is already ridiculous.
The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg keeps a working population of cats, generally reported at fifty to sixty animals. The museum deliberately holds the number around fifty. Each cat is issued a passport with a photograph, which functions as its employment record. There is a press secretary who fields media questions about them, which is a sentence I enjoy typing.
Here is the part most articles get slightly wrong, including a lot of very pretty ones. The cats do not roam the galleries. They are not curling up next to the Rembrandts. They live and work in the cellars, basements and service corridors underneath the complex, which is where rodents actually get in. The romantic image of a tabby patrolling a hall of Old Masters is not how it works. The cats are pest control with a very good address.
The museum runs an adoption program to keep the population in check. People apply, come meet a cat, and take one home, which means Hermitage cats have quietly spread out across Russia for years. There is also an annual event, usually held in late spring, where the public gets tours of the cat cellars. It has turned into a real city occasion and a fundraising hook for animal welfare.
Think about that for a second. A world-class art museum has an annual public holiday for its basement cats. My four get a birthday photo on Instagram and I consider myself generous.
Peter the Great, and a Story I Can Only Half Verify
Almost every version of this story starts with Peter the Great, and this is where I want to slow down.
The commonly repeated account is that Peter brought a cat named Vasily back from Holland during his time in Western Europe, and installed him at the palace. You will see this stated flatly all over the internet. What I can tell you honestly is that it is the traditional account, retold by the museum and by Russian press, and I could not find a primary document behind it. Treat it as the story Russians tell about Peter, not as a receipt.
You will also see a claim that Peter issued a decree ordering households to keep cats to protect grain stores. Same situation. Widely repeated, poorly sourced. I am leaving it in as a legend and labeling it as one.
What is not in dispute is the underlying logic. Peter founded St. Petersburg in 1703 on marshy ground at the edge of the Baltic, and a brand new port city built on wet ground is a rodent paradise. Ships bring rats. Warehouses feed them. Grand stone buildings with deep cellars give them somewhere to live. Cats were not decorative in that environment. They were infrastructure.
The 1745 Decree: Thirty Cats From Kazan
Here is the piece with an actual paper trail, and it is my favorite document in the entire story.
In the autumn of 1745, Empress Elizabeth, Peter's daughter, issued a decree on sending cats to the court. She ordered roughly thirty large mouse-catching cats brought to the Winter Palace. Not from anywhere nearby. From Kazan, about 1,200 kilometers southeast of St. Petersburg, because Kazan cats had a reputation for being enormous and relentless.
Sit with the logistics of that. This is the 1740s. Someone in the imperial administration received an order that said, essentially, go acquire thirty of the meanest cats in Kazan and transport them across the country to the palace. Somebody had that job. Somebody loaded thirty furious cats into carts and drove them 1,200 kilometers to St. Petersburg in the fall.
I have transported one cat forty minutes to the vet. Minnie Mouse screamed the entire way and then gave me the silent treatment for two days. Thirty cats. Twelve hundred kilometers. Horse-drawn. I think about this man more than is normal.
Elizabeth's decree is the thing that turns "there were probably cats around" into "the Russian state formally imported cats as palace staff," and it is the real beginning of the Hermitage cat line.
Catherine the Great Made It Official
Catherine the Great is the one who built the Hermitage collection into what it became, and she is also the one credited with formalizing the cats' status. Under Catherine, the standard account goes, the palace cats stayed on officially as guardians of the picture galleries.
The phrase is charming and it is repeated by the museum itself, so I am comfortable including it, with the caveat that "guardians of the picture galleries" is a title from tradition rather than a job description anybody was following literally. It also is not the same thing as saying Catherine loved cats. Reporting on that varies, and some accounts say she preferred dogs. What she demonstrably did was keep the cats employed.
From roughly that point forward, with interruptions, cats have been at the Hermitage for more than two and a half centuries. That is a longer continuous run than almost any human institution I can think of, and it has been maintained by an animal that cannot be told what to do.
The Cat of Kazan: When a Cat Became Political Satire
While the palace was importing cats, ordinary Russians were putting cats on their walls.
Lubok prints were cheap woodblock pictures, the popular graphic art of Russia from roughly the seventeenth century until the early twentieth. They were the printed media of people who were not aristocrats. Bible scenes at first, then jokes, folk tales, current events, and satire.
One of the most famous recurring characters is the Cat of Kazan. The standard caption runs along the lines of "the Cat of Kazan, the Mind of Astrakhan, the Wisdom of Siberia," which parodies the stacked geographic titles the tsars used. There is a well known print called "The Mice Are Burying the Cat," a chaotic funeral procession of rodents hauling an enormous dead cat, and it has been read for centuries as a joke at the expense of Peter the Great and his court.
I want to be careful here, because scholars genuinely argue about this. Some read the mice-burying-the-cat print as direct anti-Peter satire. Others think the association came later and the print is older and broader than that. What is not really contested is the shape of the thing: in Russian popular culture, the cat became a stand-in for the powerful, the sly, and the unaccountable. A whiskered emperor who does what he wants.
Anyone who has lived with a cat will recognize the casting immediately.
Cats in Russian Folklore
Russian folklore does not treat the cat as a pet. It treats the cat as something closer to a minor supernatural authority.
Kot Bayun
Kot Bayun is a giant sorcerer cat with a voice that carries for miles. The voice puts travelers into a sleep indistinguishable from death, at which point Bayun kills them with iron claws. He is not a friendly character. He is a monster.
But the tales come with a twist that I find genuinely interesting. If a hero manages to capture Bayun alive, the same voice becomes medicine. His stories cure illness. The cat is both the poison and the cure, which is a very cat idea. The thing that hurts you and the thing that comforts you are the same animal, and which one you get depends on the day.
The Learned Cat
Then there is the most famous cat in Russian literature. In the prologue to Pushkin's "Ruslan and Lyudmila," there is a green oak by the curved shore, a golden chain around it, and a learned cat walking round and round that chain, telling stories as he goes. Left, he sings a song. Right, he tells a tale.
Russian schoolchildren memorize these lines. It is one of the most recognizable passages in the language. Pushkin's cat is a softened, literary descendant of Bayun, stripped of the murder and left with the storytelling, and he functions as the doorway into the whole world of Russian fairy tales. The animal that guards the entrance to the stories is a cat.
The Cat Goes In First
The custom I like most is still practiced. In Russia and across a lot of the post-Soviet world, when you move into a new home, you let a cat walk through the door before any person does.
The reasoning varies by who you ask. The cat absorbs whatever bad energy is left behind. The cat settles things with the domovoi, the household spirit who was there before you and will be there after. The cat picks the safest spot to sleep and you put your bed there. Whichever version you get, the underlying belief is the same: the cat perceives something about a house that people do not, and you should defer to it.
Russian banks have run promotions offering mortgage customers a cat to borrow for the ritual. That is not a joke I made up. That happened.
The Siege of Leningrad
This is the part of the article where I stop being funny.
German forces encircled Leningrad in September 1941. The blockade was not fully lifted until January 1944, running roughly 872 days. It is one of the deadliest sieges in recorded history. Estimates of civilian deaths vary between sources, but they run into the hundreds of thousands, with many historians citing figures around 800,000 or higher. People starved to death in their apartments through Russian winters with no heat, no electricity, and rations that at their worst amounted to a few ounces of adulterated bread per day.
I am not going to write around the next part, because writing around it would be dishonest. The city's cats were eaten. Pets, strays, essentially all of them. People who were starving to death ate the cats, and in a number of documented accounts a family cat is credited with keeping a household alive through a winter.
I have four cats sleeping in my office right now. I do not have any framework for judging a person in that position and I am not going to try.
What followed was the consequence nobody had time to plan for. With the cats gone, the rat population of Leningrad exploded. Rats moved through the ruins in numbers survivors described as columns. They got into what little food remained, chewed through walls and communication lines, and carried disease into a population that had no physical reserves left to fight infection. A city that had already lost everything now had a plague problem on top of it.
1943: The Cats Come Back
In January 1943 Soviet forces broke a corridor through the encirclement. Supplies could move again, barely. And one of the things the authorities decided to move, deliberately, by rail, was cats.
The account that gets told in Russia is that four railcars of cats were collected in Yaroslavl and sent to Leningrad specifically to deal with the rats. A later and much larger consignment was gathered from Siberian cities, with the number usually given as around five thousand animals. People in those cities handed over their own cats to be shipped to a city they had never seen.
Accuracy note, because this matters to me: the shipments are firmly part of the historical record and the memorials in St. Petersburg exist because of them. The specific numbers, four cars and five thousand cats, come from popular retellings and Russian press rather than from an archival document I can point you to, and the dating of the Siberian shipment varies between accounts. I am giving you the numbers as they are commonly cited, not as figures I personally verified in a primary source.
What is consistently described is the reception. People met the trains. Cats were handed out and, in some tellings, fought over. A frequently repeated detail is that by January 1944 a kitten in Leningrad cost around 500 rubles, at a time when a kilogram of bread went for about 50. Ten times the price of bread, in a city that had just spent two and a half years starving, for an animal that could not be eaten and existed only to hunt.
Some of those cats went into the Hermitage, whose collection had survived the war in basements and evacuation and was now sitting in a building full of rodents.
That is the story, and I think it is the best cat story in the world. Not because it is cute. Because a devastated city looked at what it needed to survive and put cats on the list, in writing, and sent trains for them.
Elisey and Vasilisa
On Malaya Sadovaya Street in central St. Petersburg there are two small bronze cats mounted high on the buildings, facing each other across the street. Elisey sits on a ledge at number 8. Vasilisa arches her back on a cornice at number 3.
Both went up in 2000, timed around the anniversary of the lifting of the blockade, and they are memorials to the cats that were brought in to save the city. Tourists toss coins up at the ledges for luck. Most of the people walking underneath have no idea they are there, because you have to look up.
A war memorial in the shape of two cats on a ledge. There is nowhere else that does this.
Two Breeds Russia Gave Everybody Else
Russia also exported cats in a more literal sense.
The Russian Blue is generally traced to the northern port of Arkhangelsk, and the traditional account has sailors carrying them to England and Northern Europe in the 1860s. The first recorded show appearance was at the Crystal Palace in England in 1875, where it was exhibited as the Archangel Cat. It competed lumped in with other blue cats until 1912, when it was finally given a class of its own. That short silver-blue double coat and those green eyes came out of a subarctic Russian port.
The Siberian is the other one, and it is a natural landrace rather than a designed breed. Long, dense, triple-layered coat, big frame, absolutely built for a climate that wants you dead. Cats matching the description turn up in Russian writing for centuries, but formal breed standards for the Siberian only date to the late 1980s, which is very recent for a cat that old.
Modern Russia Owns More Cats Than Anywhere Else
This is not a vibe. It shows up in the survey data.
A widely reported 2017 survey by the research firm Dalia found that 59 percent of Russians owned at least one cat, the highest rate of any country measured. Ukraine was second at 49 percent. The United States came in third at 42 percent. Numbers like this move year to year and depend heavily on methodology, so treat it as one good survey rather than a permanent scoreboard. But the ordering has been stable across multiple sources for years.
Roughly six in ten households. In the country that formally hired cats in 1745 and shipped them in by rail in 1943. The line is not a coincidence.
Achilles, the Deaf Oracle
Modern Russian cat culture is where the whole thing loops back around into comedy, and my favorite example is Achilles.
Achilles is a white Hermitage cat who is deaf. In 2017 he was made the official animal oracle for the Confederations Cup, and then for the 2018 FIFA World Cup hosted by Russia. His method was two bowls of food, each marked with a competing nation's flag. Whichever bowl he ate from was the prediction. The Hermitage cats' press secretary, Maria Khaltunen, explained that he was selected for his capacity for choice, analysis and unusual behavior, and noted that being deaf meant crowd noise would not distract him.
He called Russia over Saudi Arabia in the opening match. Russia won 5-0. He also correctly called Iran over Morocco. His overall record across the tournament was mixed, as you would expect from a cat picking bowls, but for a few weeks a deaf museum cat was appearing in international news coverage of a World Cup.
A country that keeps cats in a palace basement for 250 years is going to eventually make one of them a national spokesperson. It was inevitable.
Viktor the Fat Cat vs. Aeroflot
The other modern story I love happened in November 2019.
A man named Mikhail Galin tried to fly from Moscow to Vladivostok with his cat Viktor in the cabin. Viktor weighed 10 kilograms. Aeroflot's cabin limit was 8. Staff refused him, and the alternative was the cargo hold on a long-haul flight, which Galin was not willing to do.
So he borrowed a smaller lookalike cat named Fibi from a friend, checked in with Fibi, cleared the weight requirement, swapped the cats after check-in, and flew with Viktor. Then he posted about it, because of course he did.
Aeroflot was not amused and stripped him of his frequent flyer account, reported at around 370,000 miles. The Russian internet reacted the way you would expect from a country where six in ten homes have a cat: an absolute avalanche of memes, competing airlines being praised as cat-friendly, and Viktor recast as a chunky folk hero being persecuted by a corporation.
Stripes is a solid boy. Not 10 kilograms, but solid. I understand the impulse completely.
What I Verified and What I Softened
Since this article gets shared more than anything else on the site, here is my accounting.
- Solid: Elizabeth's 1745 decree and the Kazan cats. The current Hermitage cat program, passports, adoption scheme and annual cat day. The siege dates and the rat crisis. The existence of the wartime cat shipments. The Elisey and Vasilisa monuments in 2000. Achilles and the 2018 World Cup, including the press secretary's quotes. The Viktor and Aeroflot incident. The Dalia survey figures. Russian Blue history at the 1875 Crystal Palace show.
- Traditional accounts, not documents: Peter the Great and the cat named Vasily. Peter's supposed cat decree. Catherine the Great designating the cats guardians of the picture galleries.
- Commonly cited numbers I could not source to an archive: four railcars from Yaroslavl, roughly five thousand Siberian cats, and the 500-ruble kitten. Real events, popularly reported figures.
- Genuinely disputed among scholars: whether "The Mice Are Burying the Cat" is specifically satire of Peter the Great.
Why This One Stuck With Me
I make cat videos and review cat gear for a living. Most of what I write about is whether a scratching post will survive Luna, who treats furniture as a personal challenge. This article is not that.
What gets me about the Russian story is that the cats were never sentimental at the start. They were hired. Imported. Assigned to basements. Nobody in 1745 was posting pictures of them. And somewhere across three centuries of empire, revolution, siege and internet, the working animal turned into a national character. The palace mousers became museum employees with passports. The rat catchers of 1943 became bronze memorials. The folk-tale monster became the friendly narrator that every Russian kid can recite from memory.
Minnie Mouse is on the corner of my desk right now, judging my typing, contributing nothing. In another century somebody might put up a statue. She would consider it overdue.
If this sent you down the same rabbit hole it sent me, there is a real body of writing on cats in Russian history and folklore worth reading. Here are books on cats in Russian history and folklore, and yes that is an affiliate link, which is how the site stays online.