For our city, the word “blockade” holds a special meaning that is always topically relevant. It experienced the attempt by an enemy to gain victory by wearing people out, their bodies and their morale, restricting all their connections, including the exchange of information.
It is not only grounds for pride and sorrow. There is the one and the other. It is, however, also a stimulus for life. The siege taught us a lot. We need to find various ways of remembering it.
The Hermitage marks important dates with a salvo of events. That happens on International Museum Day, during the Hermitage Days in December… The museum is a temple of the muses, but there is no muse of museums. There are others, who all live in the museum. That is why with us notable dates synthetically combine exhibitions, theatre, music, ballet and multimedia productions.
In commemoration of the siege, we created a series of fresh, hitherto unseen events.
Our new complex in Staraya Derevnya is located alongside the Serafimovskoye Cemetery, where inhabitants of besieged Leningrad lie buried. On 18 January, the anniversary of the breaking of the siege, a 16th-century Pskovian funeral bell was rung for the first time after restoration. That will become an annual ceremony.
Also part of our museum’s memory of the siege is a very recently received gift – a masterpiece of the Russian Moderne (Art Nouveau) style, furniture from the Svirsky factory. It came from the imperial yacht Polyarnaya Zvezda, which during the war served as a floating base for the Baltic Fleet and was anchored near the Winter Palace. A cable run from the Polyarnaya Zvezda supplied electricity for all the celebrated events held in the Hermitage during the siege.
The drawings made by the architect Alexander Nikolsky reflecting the life of Hermitage people in the museum’s air raid shelters during the siege are widely known. We drew upon those pictures to create an installation, for which we borrowed objects from the Lenfilm studio. It was something grand, like a piece of cinema.
However, our collection also contains other drawings on the same subject by an artist who used the monogram MG. Nothing was previously known about him. While Nikolsky’s works are solemn, tragic, this artist’s are more down-to-earth. One of them depicts a Grigoryev System Snore Muffler. This humorous picture led to a discovery in art scholarship – the establishment of its creator’s name: Mikhail Grigoryev. He was a theatre designer, one of the younger members of the World of Art group. He was a pilot during the First World War, before beginning to work as an artist in the theatre in the 1920s. Alexander Benois found him a place at the Mariinsky Theatre. Later he worked in the Young People’s Theatre with Samuil Marshak and Boris Sohn, produced sets for the Maly Opera [Mikhailovsky] Theatre and the Puppet Theatre. For a time, Grigoryev was in charge of the Young People’s Theatre together with Sohn. The wonderful theatre designer lived in the Hermitage’s fifth air raid shelter during the siege. After the war, he worked at the Komissarzhevskaya Theatre and left us memoirs and letters.
The theme of the siege has also become a stimulus for completely up-to-date art. In the basement of the Winter Palace, with the aid of the latest technologies we have created a new installation constructed on the basis of 3D models of Grigoryev’s drawings in combination with authentic objects. It has become part of the Celestial Hermitage project – the museum’s digital double. The 3D model of the siege-time bomb shelter has been included in the Virtual Visit to the Hermitage. The new display is not a repeat of its predecessor. It will be replaced by another, as in the Gallery of Graphic Art. Graphic art cannot be displayed for a long time, it is sensitive to light. New technologies do not live long, either. They quickly grow old. No-one wants to watch things on old screens any longer. There will be fresh installations devoted to the siege. Even ten years ago that was scarcely possible or appropriate. Now in the Hermitage basement people will don helmets and immerse themselves in the atmosphere of the life of the museum and its staff during the siege.
The first rule is do what you ought to do. The Hermitage people who lived in the museum basements engaged in scholarly research, cleared water from the parquet floors and extinguished incendiary bombs on the roof… We know that from their memoirs. Work heals people, saves them from despair.
We remember the formula “The Hermitage’s Feat” [Podvig Ermitazha]. That was the title of the book written by Sergei Varshavsky and Yulia Rest. [The English-language edition is called The Ordeal of the Hermitage.] It is about how the museum’s collections were saved. That is described as a heroic feat, and so it was. Thanks to that book, which has gone through several editions and been translated into many languages, the Hermitage’s siege-time chronicle has gone down in the history of culture as a symbol of the struggle against evil.
There is another important aspect: in that way the recollection of the siege was preserved. We must not forget that after the war there was an effort to eradicate that memory. The “Leningrad Affair” was fabricated, the Siege Museum closed. The memory had to be revived and the Hermitage played an important role in that cause.
Now, when an information blockade is knocking at our doors, it is useful to recall the experience of our predecessors.
Finding itself subjected to a blockade, the museum addressed those outside the encirclement. People in the “Big Land” had to see what was happening here. The Hermitage events – the jubilees of Navoi and Nizami – were held to raise their own spirits, but also for those who were outside the ring. The poet Nikolai Tikhonov left vivid recollections of the way Iosif Orbeli managed to persuade the city authorities in Smolny to support these cultural showcases, which the entire country had postponed, but beleaguered Leningrad held at the scheduled time.
Today, too, we strive to ensure that everything that happens at the Hermitage can be seen via the Internet, “in the cloud”. The response to an information blockade is to report as much as possible on how we are doing. That is also an address to the future.
This material was published in the Sankt-Petersburgskie Vedomosti newspaper, №17 (7593) on 31 January 2024 with the headline “The Siege Taught Us a Lot”.
