Mikhail Piotrovsky: What Is a Perfect Storm

Many interesting events have taken place recently. One of them in the USA was the storming of the Capitol. The history of the Hermitage includes the storming of the Winter Palace. It is of interest to us. We study it. Photographs have survived of the aftermath of the storm of the Winter Palace. The pictures show the abandoned offices with traces not of looting, but of common vandalism: torn up papers, bayonetted portraits of the Emperor.

The Hermitage has held exhibitions devoted to the storm of the Winter Palace. Books have been published about that chapter in our history. There are a lot of photographs in them that resemble what we saw recently on the screen: a crowd of surprised and gloating people who found themselves in the Capitol. One of the women in shot says some important words: “I have never been here in my life. Now this is all ours; it belongs to us.” That was also one of the motives of those who stormed the Winter Palace. We know that the crowd burst through the doors from various sides of the building. Like at the Capitol, in the Winter Palace they did not meet with real resistance. It was not organized, and nobody intended to resist. The deaths of people happened by chance.

In films about the revolution, we are accustomed to seeing sailors storming the palace. Sailors are the exotica of the revolution. That’s why there are so many of them in literature and in the cinema. Those doing the storming were a mixed bag. And the Capitol, too, was stormed by a mob representative of the American people – Americans, not all that young and not old.

The revolt has died away. There is an epigram by the English poet John Harington, a courtier of Elizabeth I, that sounds better in Marshak’s translation than in English: “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” Indeed, if a revolt ends in success, then it gets called a revolution. We know that.

A lot depends on how events are reported. What happened in the Capitol or the Winter Palace could be described as low farce. A shambolic mob burst in; it was driven out; it dispersed. Nothing of note occurred. That is how the storm of the Capitol was often reported. You could present the storm as a triumphant manifestation of the people’s will. You could depict it as a mere trifle. So what? Things like this often happen in the world – now in Minsk, now in Kiev, now in Madrid… You could reflect on how popular discontent reached such a level.

The coverage of the storm of the Capitol allows us to vividly picture what went on during the storming of the Winter Palace, from which we have only photographs and John Reed’s book.

One of the most striking images from Washington was the crowds of people on the famous Capitol steps, where the inauguration of presidents takes place. They look like the Hermitage’s Jordan Staircase, only not in real life, but in Eisenstein’s film October. We had an exhibition about how that was made. There are photographs, including a famous one showing Sergei Eisenstein sprawling on the imperial throne. His team is sitting on the tables in Nicholas II’s study.

Grigory Alexandrov is there too, in an armchair wearing the Emperor’s dressing gown. In Petrograd, the shooting of the film stuck in people’s memory on account of the electricity being turned off in the Hermitage and the city because of it.

October is a masterpiece of world cinema. We know that the events shown in it do not accord with the truth – and that was done specially. Sometime later Mikhail Romm shot Lenin in October. Originally the script did not include the storm. Stalin said that it had to have it. The shooting of the almost finished picture was put on hold so as to film the storm. Romm’s memoirs includes a line about approaching Hermitage Director Orbeli and being told that they had still not recovered from Eisenstein’s film shoot. There are no details. I assume they were not allowed to film in the museum. The episode was shot in the studio. That’s how it should be; without people racing around the square and the Hermitage.

Eisenstein’s October became a model for how to present a storm. The idea of a revolutionary outburst, “this belongs to us and we are not being let in”, is present in people’s movements; it can be read in their faces. Soviet art was provided with a stereotype for what a storm should look like. And not only for how to show it.

Sergei Bondarchuk’s film Red Bells [ aka Ten Days that Shook the World] was shot on Palace Square. I remember what was happening on the square where they acted out the storm. A stirring show that looked like the Battle of Borodino. The stereotype appearance of the common people storming the palace became fixed in our culture through the influence of some major artists. In Bondarchuk’s version, the storm was splendidly organized, but even less authentic than with Eisenstein. The spirit is different. With Eisenstein it’s revolutionary, with Bondarchuk it’s the spirit of a historic event. We know that military encounters, even major ones, do not look like what we see in battle paintings.

In the 1990s they made the film Osechka [Misfire] based on a story by Kir Bulychev – a comedy about how people celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution. Members of the Hermitage staff are ordered to take part, in the role of defenders of the museum. It ends with them actually defending it, not letting those re-enacting the storm into the museum.

During the Manifesta biennale six years ago, there was a fir tree standing on Palace Square. That had to do with Kristina Norman and Alevtina Kakhidze’s film The Iron Arch about events on the Maidan Nezalezhnosti. That central square in Kiev also has a column and an arch. The creators of the film walked around Palace Square, imagining they were in Kiev and speaking about what happened there. The conversation was an immersion in history and a warning.

One can reflect on how the past influences the present, while the present allows us to comprehend the past. The storming of the Winter Palace, not only in films, was staged to a considerable degree. If there is a revolution, then there ought to be a storm. If people stormed the Bastille during the French Revolution, then there should also be a storm of the Winter Palace. The idea gets developed further: if there are mass protests, there ought to be a storm. Not long ago [Armenian Prime Minister] Pashinian’s residence in Yerevan was stormed. It’s a stereotype for what you do when you are protesting.

The Capitol, like a museum, has security guards, barriers guiding visitors’ movements, queues. And suddenly we see pictures of an aggressive uncontrollable mob. It makes you think…

Now there are no crowds in the museum. There are two ways of filling it: groups and individual visitors. We are thinking about how to separate those flows. One of the ideas is separate opening hours for organized tourists. There are a lot of visitors of that sort. They have tight schedules and need to go through quickly. Most importantly, their interests aren’t the same as those of an individual visitor. We should organize the flows in such a way as to avoid crushes and conflict. Everyone who has come to the museum deserves respect.

Here it’s appropriate to raise an issue that we are discussing – the fixed routes. Most often they irritate people who haven’t previously followed a route. Formally there are time restrictions, but no-one is going to chase them out of the museum. The Vatican has always had fixed routes. People often request a guided tour so as to be shown how to go around the museum. A fixed route is an imposition of order on the one hand, on the other it can be an interesting plot line.

I have built up a set of routes that I take guests of the Hermitage around. There is the ambassadorial route – the way envoys proceeded up the Ambassadors’ Staircase to the Throne Room. There’s the imperial one – following the route by which the emperors processed out from their private apartments. There’s the revolutionary route taken during the storming of the Winter Palace by the detachment that arrested the Provisional Government. There’s the Sokurov route following the camera that shot The Russian Ark. There’s the Meryl Streep route. My list also includes the routes followed by Presidents Yeltsin, Putin, Chirac, Clinton and Bush. President Macron came to the Hermitage at night and had a shortened route. Xi Jinping’s tour was also short, but it included some interesting stretches and themes.

The Capitol in Washington now has a new tourist route.