The tenth meeting of the St Petersburg Dialogue
Yekaterinburg, 14-15 July 2010

From 14 to 15 July 2010 a new tenth meeting of the St Petersburg Dialogue, a forum of representatives of civil societies of Russia and Germany, was held in Yekaterinburg. At the Dialogue, the Culture group was chaired by Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage, and Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Heritage Foundation, a long-term partner of the Hermitage. Among a variety of topics discussed within the Culture group, where several Hermitage employees participated, a number of projects directly related to our museum were discussed. The group listened to a report on the preparation of Bronze Age, a grand Russian-German exhibition that is a continuation of a famous Merovingians exhibition. It will include the collections of Russian and German museums, including the materials relocated after the World War II. Within the group, Dresden at the Hermitage, a scientific project devoted to the history of Count Bruhl’s collection purchased by Catherine the Great, and German Forest, a project devoted to modern German art, proposed by the Hermitage were approved. The group also approved the progress with an exhibition Together for 1000 Years, a project devoted to close cultural and political connections between Russia and Germany over ten centuries. At the meeting presented were the books prepared on the basis of materials of the conferences held by the Culture group, in particular, a collection of reports entitled Preserving and Developing the World Heritage – St Petersburg and Berlin-Potsdam, which offers a comparison of museum projects, Great Hermitage and Museum Island, in Berlin.