At the behest of Tsar Peter the Great, the construction of Kadriorg Palace, dedicated to his wife Catherine, begins in Tallinn.

Peter I, better known as Peter the Great, was the Tsar of all Russia from 1682 and the first Emperor of all Russia from 1721 until his death in 1725. He reigned jointly with his half-brother Ivan V until 1696. From this year, Peter was an absolute monarch, an autocrat who remained the ultimate authority and organized a well-ordered police state.

Kadriorg Palace is an 18th-century Petrine Baroque palace in Kadriorg, Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Both the Estonian and the German names for the palace mean "Catherine's valley". It was built in 1718–1725 to Nicola Michetti's designs by Gaetano Chiaveri and Mikhail Zemtsov. The palace currently houses the Kadriorg Art Museum, a branch of the Art Museum of Estonia, displaying foreign art from the 16th to 20th centuries. The building of the Kumu branch of the museum, showing Estonian art from the 18th century onwards, is located nearby in the Kadriorg Park.

Catherine I Alekseyevna Mikhailova was the second wife and Empress consort of Peter the Great, whom she succeeded as Empress of Russia, ruling from 1725 until her death in 1727.

Tallinn is the capital and most populous city of Estonia. Situated on a bay in north Estonia, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland of the Baltic Sea, it has a population of 456,518 as of 2025 and administratively lies in Harju County. Tallinn is the main governmental, financial, industrial, and cultural centre of Estonia. It is located 187 km (116 mi) northwest of the country's second largest city, Tartu, however, only 80 km (50 mi) south of Helsinki, Finland; it is also 320 km (200 mi) west of Saint Petersburg, Russia, 300 km (190 mi) north of Riga, Latvia, and 380 km (240 mi) east of Stockholm, Sweden. From the 13th century until the first half of the 20th century, Tallinn was known in most of the world by variants of its other historical name Reval.