The State Hermitage Museum: Information

"We can’t listen to those who think on the level of vulgar hedge scribbling"
Interview with the Rosbalt-Centre information centre
4 March 2013

Are provocations in culture helpful, and what makes censorship dangerous to creativity? The General Director of the State Hermitage Museum, Mikhail Piotrovsky, answers questions from Rosbalt’s readers.

Svetlana: How do you evaluate the situation at Kizhi in Karelia, where nearly the whole republic has come out in favour of preserving it in its original condition?

M.P.: What happened with the protection of Kizhi is a perfectly wonderful event. There has been nothing else of the kind yet, people taking to the streets to protect a museum. This is an indication that the cultural level in our country isn’t that low. People understand that Kizhi is something sacred and important. But they also understand something else, that museums saved themselves from privatization, didn’t allow their collections to be looted and their institutions to be destroyed and turned into commercial enterprises. At the same time, museums demonstrated their economic attractiveness, they turned out to be tasty morsels. And now entrepreneurs just want to privatize museum and rake in money they banally make on them. Others, on the other hand, want to take museums off the government budget. Both of these approaches are wrong, because the government must support culture, and not cast that burden away. There is a third group that wants to attach themselves to a structure that works well. Tourism companies, for example. Russian tourism isn’t creative, after all; Petersburg shows us that. There are perfectly concrete structures that exist as parasites on what already exists in the city. The same thing is going on in Kizhi. Yes, the name “Kizhi” attracts millions of people there, but those millions will drown the museum. Those millions will go there, relax, eat, drink and have barbeques. We all know that. That is why we have to refer to the experience of Solovky, where the church and monastery are actively taking a stand against excessive tourist traffic. Pilgrimage, yes, but that’s something entirely different, it can be regulated.

Alexei: Can there be culture with no client?

M.P.: Absolutely, there can be culture without a client. The client can be cultured or just the opposite. In this case, our client is the government, and it has two goals. The first, as a client, is to observe the interests of the government, to demand something from culture (according to the government’s program and strategy). The second is preserving and supporting culture, for the sake of which it is meant to exist. It is difficult to make do without a client. But we have a government and a lively society, that pays by buying tickets to the museum, and therefore gives money to culture. Although we often mix up the concepts of government and society. The had the great Soviet era, from which we have taken all the very worst, and now we are repeating it as a farce. Society and the government used to be identical. Not anymore. Now the government lives on taxes from society – it depends on those who produce something, collects taxes and redistributes them to those in need. That is a completely different organism. It is conditionally called “the authorities.” It ought to have a different model in relation to culture, it must maintain “healthy cynicism”. The authorities cannot manage the entire development of museum and cultural life, but it must support it, for future generations, and in order to avoid looking bad on the world stage.

Marina: Aren’t you tired of all these public actions against the Chapman brothers and the rest of non-Christian culture? Why are we seeing such an upsurge in this kind of public “censorship?”

M.P.: We don’t need any kind of censorship. We need intellectual freedom that has internal censorship. For example, in American society, people don’t curse, without any kind of censorship. Over there, they curse where it’s appropriate to curse. They curse when it’s suitable for the situation, but not like we do here, when people curse without provocation. We have to acknowledge, that censorship is one of the elements that undermined Soviet society, since it was so harsh and primitive that people wanted to live outside censorship, and that was a kind of popular desire. In our time, a terrible symbol has been born in Petersburg, the Nabokov Museum, which they are attacking once again. I remind you the Nabokov House was home to Gorlit, the symbol of Russian censorship. Now that it is the Nabokov House again, people have started to throw all kinds of things at it and write filth on the walls, demanding a return to censorship. And that is a farce.

Tatiana: Does such an upsurge in attacks on Nabokov indicate permissiveness?

M.P.: No, it isn’t permissiveness. It’s just time to make a decision; we have freedom, after all, and freedom makes life easier for gangsters too. Other forms of struggle are underway, but they should not be conducted with the help of censorship. Was is going on in Petersburg right now? We are a museum that has wound up on the front line between banal primitivism and intellectualism. Therefore, we are defending the right to remember Russian culture as it really is, and the right to say the metaphor and literature are not the same as some vulgar hedge scribbling. The Hermitage is a great democratic museum, which must show that it already exists and is recognize, it is also compelled to consist on its right to demonstrate that, and not listen to those who think on the level of vulgar graffiti. Proper discussion must be established. People must be educated and cultivated. People have the reader books, then they will understand what’s going on. Yes, that is much harder than forbidding things. But nothing can be forbidden, everything will be done backwards. But we need to create conditions for people to understand that this can’t be done. That’s all.

All of the public figures that are now taking a stand on various issues are a phenomenon that was born recently, but, to a significant degree, refers to the Soviet time, when certain movements began with various provocations within the community. That’s the way it always was here: articles in the newspaper that provoked the community however you like (the Shakhtinsky affair, the Bukharin affair, etc). People got used to the fact that, with the help of some denunciation or other, they could change the situation in a way that discussion count not. In the Soviet time there really was a whole apparatus, a system for perceiving public opinion and manipulating it, and now free organization have emerged that are involved in god knows what and call themselves by various names. The Cossacks, for example. I am very ashamed that we seem to be answering those Cossacks. But the people writing those things are no Cossacks…

Vasily Urovsky: Are the organizations that are trying to ban “immoral” exhibits in Petersburg just do for the sake of their own PR?

M.P.: I don’t know why they’re doing it. That phenomenon exists on its own terms. Some might be doing it for their own PR, others for the sake of some underground man’s complaints, there’s someone that hate, someone they can’t stand. The Hermitage, or culture in general. Each of them has their own reasons. The most important thing is that they are trying to use violence or the authorities to establish something else. Although it is possible to have a good healthy discussion about everything. For example, the issue of blasphemy. Now we are going to have a serious discussion, with lawyers, not some narrow minded lumpens, about what blasphemy is. In Germany, there is a conversation going on about various prohibitions, connected to blasphemy and sacrilege. But who is talking about it? A very famous writer, who created a whole series of book about the Latin liturgy, about how the liturgy has to be translated into Latin, i.e. we need to translate it back. He knows what he’s talking about. And then people are discussing, conducting seminars, there’s a conservation going on. We have something to talk about here. But when the community that we have here wants to shout, display itself and name itself… I’ve already quoted what Shimon Peres said in Davos. People don’t need to work a lot, maybe three hours a day, and you have to eat twice a day, three is a lot; but you have to read three times a day. It’s like Lenin’s slogan, “study, study and study!” You can only talk to people when they’re cultured. Otherwise, there is nothing to talk about. School, university and the state exam aren’t enough; that’s just minimal base knowledge. You have to study more on your own. That is why museums exist.

I repeat, we need discussion. A range of different “disagreements” should lead to precisely that, a discussion, and not a letter to the prosecutor, not calling for censorship or using the authorities to get your way by force. If we start to have a discussion, then we will cultivate a society that will know how to do that, what they need to talk about and what they need not to talk about. Here’s a great example from American life. The Kennedy brothers had an absolutely “loose” lifestyle, but the American press didn’t write about that. They knew about Marilyn Monroe too, and all their tricks, but they understood that those people were doing work that the country needed. So the press didn’t touch them. When Kennedy died, Lyndon Johnson became president, and he asked the press if they were going to treat him the same way. They told him to go to hell – we’ll be talking to you differently. That is the serious internal censorship that we are lacking, because those mechanisms were weakened by Soviet censorship, so we don’t have internal censorship, the censorship that decorum provides. We have to cultivate it. When it comes to homosexuality, I don’t know, but all the noise about paedophilia has sharply increased its growth in Russia. It’s an illness that turns in on its, a perversion that can emerge in a person when we’re constantly talking about it. If we don’t talk about it, people will never learn about it.

A family from Petersburg: Why do Russians have to show their passports when they enter the Hermitage? Otherwise you have to pay the same rate as foreigners. Why gouge us like that?

M.P.: That’s an other remnant of the Soviet system. In the Soviet times, everyone lived poorly and everyone had equal rights. That was when the idea of freeloading emerged. But the Soviet system fought parasitism; we need only remember the law on parasitism under which Brodsky was tried. That’s an isolated incident, of course, but the law itself was against the fact that a lot of people got used to not doing anything. Not even doing anything at work. The Soviet habit of freeloading; a person thinks that he has some kind of special right to go the Hermitage and pay a smaller price. No one has that right. The Hermitage has a decision to take. The museum takes money out of its pocket and says ok, a Russian citizen is poor, we’ll give him a lower price. But he has to prove that he’s a Russian citizen. This isn’t his right, it’s a discount, a subsidy. He can use it or not. If he doesn’t want to use it, it would be better if he bought a full ticket from a machine. Then he won’t stand in line. We have lines for discount tickets, because we have to give someone a ticket, even if they’re getting in for free, for record-keeping purposes. The problem is that people think they have rights that they don’t have. There are serious rights that have to be protected, and there is the sense that “everything has been given to me and someone has to give me all of this too”. No one is obligated to give you anything. There are things you’re owed and thing you aren’t. You’re owed free health care, within certain rules. If you didn’t like the free health care, well, you got what there is.

Stanislav: What does the Hermitage’s upkeep add up to every month or year. What are the Hermitage’s monthly “profits?”

M.P.: Our financial indicators are open; the Hermitage’s annual report is on our official site. In general, the Hermitage has a large budget, since construction is underway. That amounts to about a billion rubles. But now the Hermitage does have one problem, like other cultural institutions do. There is the money the museum makes, about 20%. We spend it on the development. We spend it on discount tickets for children, students and pensioners. There are budgetary amendments in to the Civil Code to deny museums the right to use that money. We will fight for it.

Georgy Vadimovich: Do you consider the government funding for the Hermitage adequate?

M.P.: There’s no such thing as adequate funding. But the goal must be clearly defined, as well as how we must spend the money on that goal. All of our laws must be subordinated to that goal, included the 94th law on tenders and contests. Throughout the country, we do often spend money that has been entrusted to us badly. This is because the existing system has a lot of monitoring, but there are also a lot of opportunities for corruption, a lot of intermediate institutions that has no interest in the result. At the museum, we conduct ten internal checks on the estimates that we receive from contractors when we spend government money. We call the Accounting Chamber to check the those who do work for government money are giving us the right prices. And those are far from always right. In the current situation, where the financing isn’t bad, our most important task is to protect our freedom to use our own resources and define functional ways to monitor the results of the use of that money. In that sense, a museum is a good example of how to do it right. We are currently reading a lot about the Ministry of Defence and so on. Museums have less money, but they have a system that makes it possible to set the right prices. The way museums are organized in an example of how a city and a government ought to live. Don’t strive for huge profits, just make sure your life is properly organized.

Kirill: The Russian authorities issued a list of federal institutions where managers receive salaries eight times higher than the employees. Those 45 institutions included the Mariinsky Theatre and the Hermitage. How much do your employees get?

M.P.: When it comes to the question of raising the compensation paid to the mangers of institution, it’s a ruse. Journalists must bear some of the blame here. They ought to not just spread information, but think about what is happening at cultural institutions. The managers of cultural institutions are appointed to their positions and receive a very small stipend. The average stipend (not salary) in cultural institutions, and at the Hermitage, is 7 thousand rubles. The salary amount to 30-34 thousand rubles, paid from non-budgetary resources. The manager of a cultural institution is appointed from above. He can be a manager there for his entire life. Later on, he is offered the change to sign a contract for a specific period of time. It is true that all managers of cultural institutions got to work on contract. Five year contracts, and harsh ones, where they can fire you at any moment, simply because the institution doesn’t like you, with no explanation necessary. There are no laws, it’s serfdom. A lot of people were fired in that way. Then the ministry starts doing calculations: how can we balance the manager’s salary with those of the staff? If it were five times higher, then the manger will get less compared to the contract salary. You can’t educe a person’s existing salary. Then the magic tricks start. We’re still talking about small sums here. It’s another matter that we are constantly talking about museum and other money. A smoke screen is being consciously created when people talk about private money, they never talk about oligarchs or billionaires, no one talks about property redistribution. Everyone ways that doctors take bribes, teachers take bribes, and museums have lots of money that they’ll spend on things outside their purview…

Vasily: Name some people other than you that would be capable of heading the Hermitage.

M.P.: The director of the Metropolitan, Tom Campbell, the director of the Louvre Henri Loyrette, the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, and the director of the Berlin Museum, Herman Parzinger could all run the Hermitage wonderfully. Just like the director of the Hermitage could run any of those museums. It’s a museum family. Any of my deputies could run the Hermitage splendidly. We are also a single team, we work in such a way that we can replace one another without bringing in someone from outside.

Eduard Kirginekov: What, in your opinion, is the higher priority function for museum, preservation or exposition?

M.P.: That’s a very good question. It’s what’s call a dialectic. A museum is obligated to preserve. The main task of a museum is to collect things and keep them in good condition for our descendants. We preserve memory. We don’t entertain people; that’s a critical point. Entertainment services is just a small part of what a museum does. On the other hand, it clear that people need to have access to what we preserve. It’s easier to preserve something if there is no access. Any access must be limited, since there is a danger to the items. There is the threat of their being stolen. When things are put in display, they are damaged by the light, dust, people walking around – they might bump it with their elbows. Museums always work with those issues. We constantly have to clarify that there is a system of preservation and a system of accessibility. We have the Great Hermitage program, its guiding principle is increasing the accessibility of our collections, but that accessibility must not be mistaken for the notion of freeloading. Nothing can be touched anywhere. Only specific items can be touched of the third category by visually impaired people. We have to write special signs because our people are always trying to touch everything.

Accessibility has different forms. There are permanent expositions where the best things are kept. There is the open storage area. It is impossible and unnecessary to display everything in our storage areas, so it is displayed in museums. It is the kilometres that no one will ever walk. The third form of accessibility is rotating exhibits, when items are shown in connection with a particular theme, some come to life in another way. 50 Dutch porcelain pipes aren’t interesting, but if you show them as part of an exhibit called “How Dutchmen in Petersburg looked”, it will make an impression on people. The next stage is the Hermitage’s exhibition centres, which hold exhibits in various parts of Russia and the world. They conduct exhibits for those who won’t come here (conspiring the various the various tastes and interests through which get out ideas across and tell people about our scientific work. Then there are various Internet forms. Forms of accessibility must be dynamic. We have to understand, that it is a dialectic. We have to understand that the fact that you see something damages that thing. Yes, they belong to the people, but the people can’t touch them. That’s the principle.

Dmitry: How do you feel about the policy of the Russian museum, for example, which consists of isolating people from the surrounding space and turning that space into a museum to the extent that it nearly becomes a cemetery?

M.P.: I don’t see how the Russian Museum is isolated from anyone. I don’t see any negative aspects of the work of the Russian Museum, accessibility in particular That museum conducts active work, just like other museums. I don’t see anything hoary about it. Quite the opposite, it is very open to new, contemporary art. There are various interesting theatrical approaches to organizing exhibits and exhibitions.

Ivan: Why didn’t you lay a claim to the Naryshkin treasure, so that it would be kept in your museum?

M.P.: We (and this is also a question of culture) don’t lay claim to anything. We are a great museum. We do a lot of things better than others. What we offer is the best recipes. When we talk about the Customs House building in Petersburg, it isn’t because we need it; we have facilities, thank God. We think that there could be nothing better for the Customs House than to open a museum of the Russian flag and coats of arms there. It’s the same with the Naryshkin treasure. We said that we have enough silver items. But we are the only institution that can study that entire treasure; it is very interesting and complicated, and there are so many mysteries about how it emerged. We have a whole exhibit, and a book came out about the treasure of the Likhacheva factory owner. We can create a beautiful exhibit and publicize it, then it can be stored wherever you like. It would be best to do it in a private museum, in the house where the treasure was found. We made a proposal. It was not accepted, and as a result, in my opinion, that extremely interesting treasure did not receive proper scientific study.

Dmitry: When will the Hermitage’s numismatic department be accessible to the public?

M.P.:I hope that the numismatic halls will be restored in a yeah, and then we will open a new exhibit.

Dmitry: Are there plans to return valuables that were stolen from the Hermitage by the Bolsheviks and sold in the 1930’s?

M.P.: The Bolsheviks didn’t steal things, they just sold them. They were the authority that had the power to do so. This is an important issue – property. That’s what I was talking about. The government has an obligation to protect cultural artefact. But that is not the same as government property. There are limitations on government property, we must always remember that. Unfortunately, we cannot return what was sold. It was, after all, bought legally. We can only buy them back. But any thing can happen. Forbes bought the Faberge eggs, then Vekselberg bought them from him. We’ll see, perhaps we’ll buy them back.

Natalia: What is your favourite item or hall in the Hermitage? Which paintings make you struggle, and which help you to withdraw from our grim reality?

M.P.: I never tell anyone about that, because it’s my personal business. Everyone should have his own favourite pieces. It isn’t a question of which you like most; you have to pick things that make you think. There are things that delight the eye. For example Leonardo da Vinci’s Benois Madonna; it delights the eyes, and his Madonna Litta does too, but it also makes you think. Kandinsky’s Composition 6 also makes people think about the history of art, about abstraction and not abstraction. The painting is dedicated to the worldwide flood, abstraction can get the idea of the flood across must better than if you just draw a flood or film it. You have to choose paintings that you can contemplate and think about, not just receive pleasure.

Sergey: I have more of a request than a question. When will you return to television? Believe me, that’s very important to all of us.

M.P.: I don’t avoid television at all. Quite the opposite, people always ask me how it’s possible to be on television so much.

Irina: Has your position on holding large concerts in Palace Square changed?

M.P.: No, it hasn’t changed. Palace square should host concerts that suit that space. I have to say that there has been great progress on that issue. Everything that happens in Palace Square is approved by us in one way or another. We establish certain conditions. We understand that a whole range of events has to be conducted in the square, but there shouldn’t be rock concerts there. There also shouldn’t be exercise events, when people that don’t look particularly good assemble and do various exercises. A beautiful start or finish to an event can happen there. But there shouldn’t be big stages there, or seats for VIP guests. We are in a constant struggle with organizations and private individuals. Every day, my desk is covered with requests to approve and discuss something. We are very hopeful that Petersburg’s other squares will be used more, but, again, they have to be used properly. Perhaps a stadium will finally be built, and they can have concerts there.

Larisa: What is your opinion about the reconstruction projects in the historical centre of Petersburg, such as the tunnel and restaurant under Palace Square, for example?

M.P.: That’s all foolishness. There is one good project, which envisions using the courtyards of the entire historical centre. That is, not to build anything new, but rather to renew the courtyards and first floor and built restaurants and other things that will be useful and convenient for people. When it comes to the tunnel inside the Neva, there are some questions there. I don’t know the technical side very well. If it is possible to build a tunnel in the Neva and remove all the transport from the Palace Embankment, then that would be very good. Our friend, architect Santiago Calatrava, drew a plan of how we could re-route the transport flow to run under the Palace Embankment. Making a tunnel inside, unfortunately, impossible. We theoretically have to remove all the transport from the embankment, because it produces awful pollution. All of the buildings on Palace Embankment are threatened. Look at the fac,ade of the Winter Palace; pieces of dirt fly off of cars. We recently restored it. Cars are one of the main problems with our cities, and it’s in our prayers. Our city is being ruined by automobiles. You can’t see anything. Everything cracks. Every building is in danger. We had a large project to restore and reconstruct the Auxiliary House. There were great projects for building something inside. I categorically said no, I didn’t have a 100% guarantee that nearby buildings wouldn’t be damaged by cracks if we started digging. We have to seriously think about that.