On 7 December 2006, on St Catherine's Day, an awards ceremony was held in the Hermitage Theatre to distribute grants from the Vladimir Potanin Charitable Foundation to 100 employees of the State Hermitage. This is the second time such grants have been given out.

The objective of the joint long term program of Vladimir Potanin Charitable Foundation and the State Hermitage is to facilitate the development of the museum staff's potential and to create conditions for productive research and operational activity by the museum's promising employees. Each grant amounts to 36,000 rubles.

The grant assistance takes in a very wide spectrum of museum work. This includes not only such traditional types of activity as safe-keeping, restoration, organization of temporary exhibitions, compiling catalogues of the collections and monographs, preparing and defending dissertations, creating bibliographical handbooks, and projects in public education. Grants have also been given out to encourage specialists to successfully carry on technical and methodological research, to create electronic catalogues and to promote special projects.

The grants from the Vladimir Potanin Charitable Foundation are awarded each year on the basis of a competition. The directors of subdivisions of the State Hermitage nominate candidates considering what contributions have been made by employees to achieve museum projects, both those ongoing and those completed in the course of the current year. These applications are reviewed by a Commission on Grants within the State Hermitage with participation of the representatives of the Charitable Foundation and an expert opinion is drawn up. The final decision on giving out the grants is taken by the museum's Academic Council.

During the awards ceremony a short film was shown describing several museum programs in which employees receiving grants in 2006 participated.

The Information Partner of the 2006 Hermitage Days is the television channel STO.

Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage, at the ceremony of the distribution of Grants from the Vladimir Potanin

At the Hermitage Theatre