October 1945
Photograph
That long-awaited day finally dawned – 9 May 1945. “We continued attentively guarding the Hermitage’s treasures, giving lectures in military hospitals, tending our vegetable plots and waiting… waiting for the call from Leningrad! Tensely waiting! We knew that repair work was being done in the Hermitage and that too was not in our favour, our return was being delayed,” Glafira Nikolayevna Balashova, curator of the Oriental Department, wrote.
People in the Hermitage itself were waiting as well. On 4 June, at a general staff meeting, Director Iosif Abgarovich Orbeli, announced the anticipated reopening of the museum in August of that year. However, it was only at the end of August that the government issued a directive on the return of the Hermitage collections to Leningrad.
Armoured railway carriages were to be used to transport the items from the Special Treasury that throughout the evacuation period had been kept in the vaults of a Sverdlovsk bank. After a prolonged approval process, on 3 October two special trains were provided and loading began. The Sverdlovsk authorities allotted the museum branch 16 three-ton trucks and 120 general labourers who worked 12 hours a day. A guard was deployed next to the branch buildings and further posts set up all along the route that the vehicles carrying the exhibits would follow. Altogether, over the course of four days, more than 2,500 crates were delivered to the railway station and loaded into wagons. On 7 October the trains left the platform in Sverdlovsk one hour apart.
It became a matter of urgent necessity to carry out a refurbishment of the damaged display halls, to restore the plaster that had come away due to damp and the crumbling stuccowork in the Raphael Loggias, to repair the mosaic floors, to replace the window frames, to reconstruct the ceiling and floor of the Armorial Hall that had both been pierced by an artillery shell in January 1944.
On 10 October, the trains carrying the Hermitage treasures arrived safely in Leningrad, where they were met by members of the museum staff headed by Iosif Abgarovich Orbeli. Unloading began on 11 October, with the Hermitage’s own workers being supplemented with around 100 artillerymen and firefighters, as well as 50 riggers from the city’s motor transport administration. A standard was even raised on the spire of the Winter Palace for the occasion and all the museum buildings decked with flags, but the militia objected, and they had to be removed. Scaffolding with a hoist was installed on the Large Staircase of the New Hermitage in order to lift particularly heavy exhibits. It was used to raise Houdon’s statue of Voltaire before it was unpacked from its protective double crate in the adjoining Gallery of the History of Ancient Painting. The unloading was completed on 13 October.
In a mere 22 days, they restored and reopened to the public the displays of the Picture Gallery, the Special Treasury, the Knights’ Hall, the halls of Classical Antiquity and of the Oriental and Numismatic Departments.
On 4 November, the museum held a ceremonial opening for specially invited guests – representatives of regional and district party committees, creative unions, the Academy of Sciences, theatres, museums, cinema and radio, building organizations that had participated in the restoration of the museum’s halls and buildings, the KGB, the militia, military colleges that had guarded and unloaded the exhibits, the printshops that produced the tickets, as well as departments of public education and health.
“On the upper floor of the Khalturin Entrance the guests were greeted by Iosif Abgarovich himself., He gave a brief speech and ceremonially declared ’The Hermitage is open!’,” Galina Balashova recalled.
“The public hastened into the open halls so as to see and make sure that the Hermitage was indeed open once more and that the Hermitage’s objects were intact!” They were preserved for coming generations by members of the Hermitage staff who held out during the most dreadful days of the siege in Leningrad and staff of the Sverdlovsk branch who all that time watched over their preservation. On 8 November the Hermitage was opened to the general public.
The materials and data relating to the return of the Hermitage exhibits from evacuation were gathered and made available by Yelena Yuryevna Solomakha, deputy head of the Research Archive of Manuscripts and Documentary Fund.