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In November 2001 a television crew turned this palace into Catherine the Great's residence and picked the wrong one. The scene was from Gogol: the blacksmith Vakula presented at court, which in the story happens in St Petersburg. They shot it in Kyiv. Catherine II had lived in this exact building between January and April 1787, and the reporter who filed from the set that day, Tamara Belyakova, opened her piece with the coincidence.
That is how the building works on screen. Three films are on the record here, and in every one the palace is somewhere it is not: Catherine's Petersburg, a hetman's residence it never was, a British colonial house in Delhi. What actually happened inside it has never been filmed, and it runs to a Cheka prison in 1918, a mineral-water sanatorium, a Shevchenko museum that lasted ten weeks in 1941 and, in 1943, a Soviet bomb into the White Hall.
The 2001 film was a musical of Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka; everything not set at court was done in the Ukrtelefilm studios. In 1976 Days of the Turbins made the south facade the Hetman's residence, which Pavlo Skoropadskyi never had here. His was the governor general's palace, where Bulgakov's novel puts it. The evidence for that 1976 shoot is also thin: the Ukrainian and Russian articles agree with each other, no production source turned up, and the only footnote in the chain ends at an amateur photo album.
Getting a camera in here is a matter of the president's diary. Anna Palenchuk, who ran the Ukrainian end of RRR in August 2021, says she was told at the start that it was unrealistic, and that it came through direct dealing with the Office of the President. "This is the president's residence, and we understood that at any moment he could decide to hold a reception or a meeting there," she says. She spent the shoot asking the protocol services of the president and the first lady to schedule nothing, because the sets could not have been struck in a few hours.
Reconstruction began in June 2007, was meant to end in 2011 and was still running in 2017. The palace reopened in 2018, guided visits began in 2020, and in February 2022 they stopped. The notice suspending them is still on the front page of the palace's own site, and it carries no date.