Mikhail Piotrovsky: The Past Teaches and Prepares Us for the Future

The Hermitage preserves the memory of the siege. In some halls you can see reproductions of how they looked during the war. On the day when we marked the anniversary of the initial breakthrough in the siege, red flowers were placed next to them.

In the Armorial Hall, where the ceremony took place, there is currently a display of remarkable porcelain. It is made up of pieces from imperial services recently donated to the museum. They have come back to the Hermitage and are being shown in such a way that it is possible to read the makers’ marks.

No material is more fragile than porcelain. Alongside it, we recollected the war that failed to destroy it. Just as it failed to destroy the Hermitage. Besides everything else, the Hermitage is a museum of porcelain. In the past year, we have had a large number of exhibitions devoted to this material. In 2023, too, there will be an exhibition about how people sought the secrets of porcelain-making, what detective stories took place around that. And another about imitations of Sèvres porcelain. Fakes, replicas, repetitions of old services… The Hermitage researches all of that, so as to understand what is authentic and what is counterfeit.

Manuscripts do not burn; cups do not break… I have repeatedly stated that museums are exceptionally delicate organisms. It is easy to destroy them. They may disappear as great cultural phenomena. The main threat to museums is war. In the wars of the Middle Ages an exchange of cultures occurred one way or another. Suffice it to recall the Napoleonic Wars. Later, wars changed their character, and no cultural exchange takes place during them. Twentieth-century warfare is the most extreme form of the negation of culture. When reflecting on the fragility of museums, it is no mere chance that we place a shell fragment and porcelain next to each other.

On the day when we marked the anniversary of the breaking of the siege, a film was screened in the cellar of the Winter Palace about the life of the Hermitage during evacuation in Sverdlovsk [Yekaterinburg]. For next year and its 80th anniversary of the complete liberation of the city, we will be creating a display in the cellar about how the museum lived under siege.

We recall the siege all the time. We read attentively about how people behaved at that time, remember how scholarly conferences were communicated across the encirclement… At one time that seemed to be already entirely a thing of history. But the experience of our predecessors is not merely interesting and important, it needs to be borne in mind. It may be required, gloomy as that might sound. Because today, too, museums are under threat.

What is taking place in the zone of the special military operations is affecting museums as well. The stocks have been preserved from the Melitopol museum, where there was the famous Melitopol hoard, the bulk of which has long been kept in Kiev. The Mariupol museum has been destroyed. Some things were brought away; ahead lies the work of sorting through the ruins and reconstructing it. The mortal remains of Grigory Potemkin have been removed from Kherson. One can image what threatened them, had they remained there.

There is a plan of action for what a museum should do in time of war. It was left to us by our predecessors. First and foremost, the exhibits should be protected from the immediate threat. That might mean evacuation, removal to the basements, camouflage… That was what happened with the Hermitage during the war. That was what happened at Palmyra. When the ISIS [an organization banned in the Russian Federation – editor’s note] fighters approached, the Syrian museum workers transported the greater part of the sculpture out and thus saved it.

The next stage is that the things should return to the museum and the museum itself be restored. Everything that was evacuated returned to the Hermitage from Sverdlovsk; the museum was restored. We will be holding a exhibition commemorating Alexander Vladimirovich Sivkov, the architect who, besides everything else, oversaw the restoration of the Hermitage after the war.

News has just come from our colleagues in Syria. They are engaged in the restoration of the Arch of Triumph in Palmyra. Excavations are being conducted to revive Palmyra.

And, of course, one more thing that a museum should do is to record everything going on around it. Our exhibitions are the result of the Hermitage having recorded everything that took place around it and conveyed that to the world. We have the shells, the story of the evacuation, books that were printed in besieged Leningrad, German and Soviet leaflets…

While everything going on around is being recorded, in parallel you compile a “damage report”. The harm that has been done is immediately noted. That is important for the subsequent restoration. Not everyone notices that when the Manege of the Small Hermitage was being refurnished, the marks caused by shells were left as a remembrance. The shells struck the storage for carriages that was housed there. To this day, not all the carriages have been restored. The wounds of war have still not healed.

The plan of action that our predecessors left us is a textbook on how a museum should live in wartime. We need to bear in mind that the past teaches and prepares us for the future.

We tell about what the Hermitage did during the siege without hysterics. That is the style of speaking about the siege that developed in Saint Petersburg. Sometimes it strays into the theatrical, the histrionic, but never the hysterical. It is the speech of people who are sure of themselves.

There is one more important thing. We are constantly hearing that the muses should keep silent until the guns stop speaking. That is regarded as proper. Here, I should like to tell about Andrei Reshetin, who has gone off to the zone of the special operation as a volunteer. Today he is frequently mentioned in the media. They write that he was a violinist with Grebenshchikov in [the long-lived rock band] Aquarium. Reshetin has long since been known for something completely different. He is one of the important figures in Russian culture. He created a superb international festival – EarlyMusic and the Soloists of Catherine the Great orchestra. He has engaged in the reconstruction of Baroque operas. What he does is an important phenomenon within Russian culture. A very Petersburg phenomenon – the Baroque is fragile, like porcelain.

Reshetin and I have worked together a lot, and we spoke on the eve of his departure. As I anticipated, Andrei has found his place there. He is again playing the violin. His playing, the Baroque style of music proved to be in demand. It is understandable when poets write verses in such a time. When musicians play, it is a special, symbolic, very Petersburg story. It holds echoes of our Petersburg life. During the siege, people of different kinds lived here. They were united by concern for the fate of the city. It held out because people defended it with strength of spirit, did not allow it to perish. Saint Petersburg is a symbol of the way a spirit of intellectual resistance is born. The way it turns into a physical wave breaching the enemy’s defences not just with artillery fire, but also with people’s will.

Mystical. But I think that the mystical aspect in the breaking of the siege and the liberation from it should be studied. Museums, in particular, are doing so. They tell about seemingly minor details, such as how people boiled joiner’s glue [for nourishment] during the siege. At the same time, they are telling about strength of spirit. Today, looking in the past in a new way, we are beginning to understand it more and more.

This material was published in the Sankt-Petersburgskie Vedomosti newspaper, №13 (7342) on 25 January 2023 with the headline “The Past Teaches and Prepares Us for the Future”. The original text can be found here.