Photograph
1941
Iosif Abgarovich Orbeli, Director of the Hermitage during the Great Patriotic War: “On 22 June 1941, all the Hermitage’s workers were summoned to the museum. The Hermitage’s researchers, security workers, technicians – everyone joined in the packing, spending no more than one hour in 24 on eating and resting. Then, from the second day there came to our aid hundreds of people who loved the Hermitage…”
From the memoirs of Boris Borisovich Piotrovsky: “When I got back to the Hermitage, packing was underway for the second train, which left for Sverdlovsk on 20 July. Altogether 1,118,000 items were transported out. It was dangerous to send the proposed third train off to the east, and the crates intended for it remained in the Hermitage throughout the war. The packing was proceeding apace. [Iosif] Orbeli turned up everywhere, usually accompanied by the architect [Alexander] Sivkov. Everyone was working, both elderly and young. During the intensive days of packing, I spent the nights in the Hermitage, usually on the table in my office, but in the more relaxed days I went home for the night.”
From the memoirs of Glafira Nikolayevna Balashova: “The restorers also took part in the process, giving guidance on the packing of difficult items. Since a portion of the researchers had been mobilized for the defence works, great assistance was provided in the preparations for dispatch by ‘volunteers’ – students and artists, whose hearts called them to the Hermitage. 1 July 1941… A special-purpose train was brought to the goods yard of the Moscow railway station, made up of 22 large four-axled wagons, one armoured carriage and one first-class for accompanying personnel and for the members of the military guard to rest in. Towards evening, trucks started to pull up to the Hermitage to load up with crates. Accompanied by museum researchers and armed soldiers, trucks set off from every entrance heading for the Moscow station. Across Palace Square, along Nevsky Prospekt…”
The place that was to take in the Hermitage collections was the city of Sverdlovsk in the Urals (now once again known as Yekaterinburg). A branch of the Hermitage was established there, and its director throughout the war years was Vladimir Frantsevich Levinson-Lessing, the head of the Department of Western European Art. On 30 June, on the first train consisting of 22 goods wagons, around half a million Hermitage exhibits were sent off to Sverdlovsk – practically the entire museum display. A second train departed on 20 July, carrying with it some 700,000 items from the reserve stocks. The third train, already prepared to depart, would remain in Leningrad: on 30 August the rail routes were cut off by enemy forces.
In Sverdlovsk, to house the treasures from the Hermitage the authorities allocated the building of the Picture Gallery and also the premises of the Roman Catholic Church of the Conception of Saint Anne and the Anti-Religious Museum (the house of the merchant Nikolai Ipatiev, where Nicholas II and his family had been shot in 1918).
Only the Picture Gallery met the requirements for the storage of works of art – it was there that they installed the crates from the first train containing the items that were most precious and most vulnerable to fluctuations in temperature and humidity. In 1943, the Hermitage was given the building of the Maxim Gorky Club at 24, Pervomaiskaya Street to house exhibits. The crates from the church and the Anti-Religious Museum were moved there, as well as some from the Picture Gallery on Vainer Street.
Members of the Hermitage staff who arrived in Sverdlovsk with the second train kept watch in the rooms where the exhibits were stored. Under the difficult conditions of evacuation, they continued to engage in research work, to write dissertations and monographs.
Fyodor Kalikin, head of the Hermitage’s restoration workshop, during preparations for an exhibition.
The Hermitage evacuees provided what help they could to museums in the Urals, organized exhibitions (for example, the temporary exhibition “The Military Valour of the Russian People” opened in 1943 at the House of Collective Farm Workers), and gave lectures at educational institutions, military hospitals and units, collective farms, factories and on hospital trains.
Unpacked exhibits from the 1812 Gallery in the exhibition “The Military Valour of the Russian People” in Sverdlovsk. 1943
The State Hermitage Boarding School
The late June days that followed the outbreak of war became a dramatic moment in the lives of thousands of Leningrad families. Not only husbands and fathers were to be taken from them: on 29 June 1941, the Leningrad City Executive Committee took a decision on the evacuation of children. A new type of institution for children was created – boarding schools that retained the identifying numbers of regular schools, kindergartens and children’s homes, or else the names of major city organizations.
The management of the State Hermitage Boarding School was entrusted to the head of the School Lecture Centre, Liubov Vladimirovna Antonova, with responsibility for the life and health of 146 youngsters falling on her shoulders.
“Mama Liuba”, as Hermitage people would call her for many years afterwards, recalled: “… Iosif Abgarovich Orbeli summoned me to his office. Dressed in dark blue overalls with wisps of cottonwool sticking to them, he gave me his hand and said with emotion: ‘The health of the children in the rear will determine the mood of fathers and mothers at the front. Here are 5,000 roubles for you, for a rainy day. Use them as conscience dictates.’ (It was only after the war that I learnt that this was his own money.)”
The train carrying the children departed from the Moscow Railway Station. Leaving dozens of mothers behind in tears on the platform, they arrived at a little station called Krasny Profintern, 40 kilometres east of Yaroslavl.
Despite their warm reception and successful arrangements made for them in this new refuge, the city children found it hard to adapt to country life, helping out in the kitchen and washing unpainted floors – it turned out that many did not even know how to do the dishes. Besides the difficulties of day-to-day life, in contrast to their younger fellows, who soon grew accustomed to their new surroundings, the older ones were also troubled by a yearning for their home and parents. However, neither the children nor their mentors could even have imagined what trials lay ahead for them: they would have to move once again, deeper into the rear of the country – to Molotov (now Perm) Region.
Before being sent to the Urals, the children found themselves in Gorodets, a town on the Middle Volga famed for its picturesque, almost fairy-tale architecture. School buildings were set aside for the Leningrad children. Unfortunately, a measles epidemic broke out in the town and took the lives of four children, including Liubov Antonova’s own daughter.
At that point the school had to split up: an army unit that arrived in Gorodets agreed to transport the healthy children to a railway station 50 kilometres away, where a train was waiting to take them to Molotov. Antonova stayed behind to care for those who were sick.
Yevdokiya Mikhailovna Yefimova
“And so we have reached our destination, where we are to spend the winter. The journey was long and hard… We are doing everything to save the children who are lying in the Molotov city hospital. … Greetings to all the staff. Where is Iosif Abgarovich? He has not fallen ill…”
By the middle of December, having made the difficult journey in heated goods wagons, the boarding school, with the household steward Yevdokiya Yefimova in charge, arrived in the Urals, which greeted them with 45 degrees C of frost (temperatures plunged to the same levels in Leningrad over the first winter of the siege). The rural inhabitants, who were themselves suffering hunger and privations, resolved to help the Leningrad youngsters.
In the spring, the boarding school acquired its own little plot of land and began to actively participate in agricultural life: the once pampered city children learnt to weed, to dig beds in exchange for potatoes, to harvest rye and even mastered timber rafting. At the front and in Leningrad, their parents eagerly awaited letters, which began to arrive in the beleaguered city by way of the Road of Life across frozen Lake Ladoga.
From the spring of 1942, the boarding school pupils began visiting wounded soldiers in the hospitals. They read books to them and brought them berries from the forest and vegetables from their own plot. After four such difficult, but highly educational, years, the State Hermitage boarding school returned home to Leningrad.
The materials and data relating to the State Hermitage boarding school were gathered and made available by Yulia Yuryevna Kuznetsova, a researcher in the Research Archive of Manuscripts and Documentary Fund.