Hermitage in Besieged Leningrad

After the evacuation daily life of besieged Leningrad started in the Hermitage. The members of the museum staff took part in building the defenses in Leningrad. The Hermitage team watched the roofs of the museum during the air-raid warning. 24-hour watches were also organised in the museum rooms. During autumn and winter of 1941 there were about 15 air-raid warnings a day. 30 shells from long-range guns and two air bombs hit the museum building. More than 20 000 sq. metres of glass were knocked out of windows and skylights. Heating network and water-supply system were destroyed.

Not only cold and bombing but also water largely endangered the exhibits. "I remember one day in 1942, when Piotr Petrovich Firsov, chief engineer of the Hermitage, in our presence started breaking the lock on a rusty metal door leading to the cellar. Upon opening the door we saw a sea of water and floating in it porcelain and chandeliers that had dropped from their rotten ropes into the water. Many were from the Pavilion Hall. In the pitch darkness we gathered from the bottom of this sea sunken things filled with mud and sand", - Olga Mikhailova, Department of Western European Fine Art.

The Hermitage employees did their best to save the museum: they had been replacing broken glass on the windows with plywood, stemming roof holes, getting rid of garbage, breaking the ice off inside the building and around it. Remaining artworks, furniture, sculptures, stone and bronze vases, porcelain, armour were moved to the ground floor rooms and to the basements and were regularly checked on and cleaned and restored if needed.

Vegetable patches were laid out in museum courtyards and in the Hanging Garden. Museum’s twelve basements were turned into bomb shelters. 2000 people including Hermitage Museum employees with families and Leningrad’s well-known academicians and artists lived there during autumn and winter of 1941.

"31 December 1941. There has been no light in the shelter for about a week and a half. There’s no heating. We sit in the dark with primitive oil-lamps. Still we don’t feel too bad and intend to celebrate the New Year. I pasted together a small tree from craft paper. I am making decorations for it from gold paper. The best thing would be to hang it from the ceiling …" - artist Alexander Nikolsky, who lived with his family in one of the shelters and created a series of drawings of the Hermitage during the Siege. His drawings accompanied Iosif Orbel’s accusatory speech at Nuremberg Trials.

Committee for Matters Concerning Art commissioned several other artists to work in the Hermitage, recording its war life and destructions. Among them were Vera Miliutina, Wassily Kuchumov, Adrian Kaplun.