“RESPECTFULLY AND WITH LOVE”

In a certain sense, they are colleagues. After all, in addition to the fact that Peter was an emperor, military commander, shipbuilder, carpenter, turner, and so on and so forth, he was very directly involved in museum activities. He was the one who founded the first museum in Russia, the famous Kunstkammer, to which he brought the most incredible curiosities from all over the world, from the most complex machines to freaks of nature preserved in alcohol.

The First Museum-Keeper

– Do you agree that Peter I was, besides everything else, also Russia’s first museum-keeper?

– Of course. And not even just because he founded the Kunstkammer, Russia’s first public museum. Peter was much concerned with what we would today call museum marketing. Hence the well-known legend that in order to attract visitors to the Kunstkammer, he ordered a shot of vodka be handed out to everyone who entered the place. Whether they did actually provide vodka or not, I don’t think anyone knows for sure. Still, the story in itself shows that Peter understood – first you have to entice people to the museum and only then do you charge them for it.

A while ago, we opened a very interesting exhibition of Peter the Great’s belongings – Chinese articles that the tsar both bought and received as gifts. By the way, he often had sketches made of them, which also shows that he was a born museum-keeper. Furthermore, he used to order items for his collection. That is to say, he was engaged in museum building. Peter the Great started a tradition. He established the Kunstkammer, the finest of its kind in Europe at the time. Following his lead, Catherine the Great formed a private art collection, the finest at the time; then Nicholas I turned that collection into a public museum – the Hermitage, again the finest. And so on. But it was unarguably Peter who started things off...

– Before Peter weren’t there any museums in this country?

– None at all. The museum is a purely European invention. It was born in Alexandria, where the Mouseion appeared, then in Renaissance Italy, while later on Chambers of Curiosities began to appear all over Europe. The royal treasuries of various sorts are a different matter.  They don’t count. We museum workers trace our origins back to Peter the Great.

– When did the Hermitage’s collection of objects associated with Peter begin to form?

– Straight after his death. It all started with the “wax persona”, which was created in the days immediately after – and the very idea of creating it testifies to contemporaries’ intention to preserve the memory of that great man. Everyone understood the significance of the first emperor for the country and the need to capture and retain his appearance, to preserve the memory. Then the collection continued to expand with genuine belongings of Peter’s. Nicholas I played a huge role in this: preserving the memory of the founder of the empire was part of his general ideology for forming a national historical memory.

A Place of Commemoration

– Exhibits relating to the life of Peter the Great have always been on display at the State Hermitage. One of the museum’s most important traditions and tasks is to keep his memory alive...

– Yes, this has always been the case. Although the Gallery of Peter the Great has journeyed quite a bit around the halls of the Hermitage (its original location, for example, was where the Gallery of Romanov Portraits is now), it has never ceased to be an important part of our museum space. At some point, it was decided to create a new display after we had acquired the Winter Palace of Peter the Great. After all, that had been absent for a very long time. Or rather, it had existed, buried under the building of the Hermitage Theatre. And one of the great results of the restoration of the theatre was the excavations that uncovered Peter’s Winter Palace – his last palace, where he died. That find changed everything at once, because part of the display of the Gallery of Peter the Great moved there – his lathes, his waxwork... All in all, I think that Peter’s Winter Palace is a separate exhibit in its own right. Its discovery was an important step towards preserving the memory of him.

By the way, we are now discussing how to actually mark the place of the first emperor’s death.

– In what sense?

– In a very direct sense. He did indeed die in his Winter Palace, but the part of the building where he passed away was cut off by the architect Giacomo Quarenghi, who built the Hermitage Theatre in the 1780s on the site of Peter’s palace. Today, therefore, the spot where Peter died is a little nook on the outside of the State Hermitage, next to the Winter Canal, where cars often park. We have long been thinking about how to commemorate the location. Should we do it inside or outside the building? We’ll probably end up putting some kind of memorial plaque outside. We still need to think how best to do it...

Carpenter, Turner, Emperor

– What formed the basis for the Peter the Great display that opened earlier this year?

– It’s the same Peter the Great Gallery, but now it’s arranged in a new way. In part because some of the items have moved to Peter’s Winter Palace. Four halls are now open. The plan is that this display will naturally transition into the halls dedicated to Peter’s daughter, Empress Elizabeth. By the end of the year, we will open them too. It will be a splendid flow from the era of Peter the Great and the realia of his time into the age of Elizabeth...

And, of course, the concept of how to display things has changed. Above all, new possibilities for showcases have appeared, and now the main item in the third hall has begun to simply sparkle. It is a panikadilo – a church chandelier – made of different types of ivory – elephant and walrus, tortoiseshell and so on. It was carved by Peter and his assistants. In a certain sense, he made a monument to himself – to his industriousness, his curiosity, his urge to touch and make everything with his own hands. We restored the chandelier of Peter the Great, so it is also a superb monument to restoration. We managed to make a showcase with good lighting, and the chandelier came alive...

– You have spoken about the chandelier, but there are navigational devices and dental instruments too... Was it unique for a monarch at that time to have such diverse interests?

– I think it was unique. On the one hand, he was a great man, who had a remarkable ability to grasp everything “on the fly”, combined with an amazing desire to learn everything, see everything, remember everything. He was interested in everything, and at the same time he understood it all and mastered things very quickly. On the other hand, unarguably, this was all bound up with the era. That was the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, when everyone in Europe was interested in everything, when learning new things was very fashionable, when people from the higher circles were interested in science and saw in it some new opportunities for self-improvement. In that sense. Peter was not alone. Yet he was, of course, a unique person – a real “natural” who absorbed everything, including the fashion trends of his day.

By the way, we have tried to show two images of Peter. There’s the image of the worker tsar, so beloved from back in Soviet times, a man who could do many things with his hands. That includes the carpenter tsar. Here we have his carpentry clothing and tools. Meanwhile on the right there’s another image – of the emperor, the tsar who took his lead from the luxury of Louis XIV and built his own Versailles, who ordered his suits in Paris on the basis of sample patterns sent to him from the French capital. His trip to Paris was indeed nothing like the journey to Amsterdam, where he had learnt to pull teeth, how to build and all manner of sciences, but a trip to pick up different things, in pursuit of luxury. The suits that he acquired for himself there were, in every sense, expensive. He was quite a dandy; his French camisole was made in the latest fashion. However, it had a turn-down collar, which only he found comfortable. In other words, Peter was undoubtedly following fashion, but even in that he did things the way he wanted.

In the second hall we have beautiful battle paintings of his day, which, incidentally, were restored for the first time for the 350th anniversary of the emperor’s birth. That was the beginning of battle painting in this country. There is also a wonderful portrait of Feofan Prokopovich in bishop’s vestments – such a large, well-made portrait. Looking at it, you start to wonder what kind of a man this Feofan Prokopovich was...

– He’s scary in that portrait!

– Very scary! A real Torquemada, you’re right. But that portrait conveys the flavour of the era, there are new emphases: it wasn’t a straightforward time...

The first room emphasizes imperialism. The saddle of Charles XII. The Battle of Poltava painted by Louis Caravaque. And while we are on the subject of the Northern War, I must draw your attention to the interesting way in which situations and assessments change. Twenty-five years ago, we thought up and organized a brilliant exhibition here and in Sweden – “Peter the Great and Charles XII”. The idea was that time has already passed, and you can talk about all these stories in peace: they are already epic heroes who used to be enemies. This was particularly easy for us because we were the winners anyway. Still, this idea was also very well received in Sweden. There was a period in Swedish historiography, when they gave thanks to God that the Russians beat them at Poltava. As a result, Sweden lost any imperial ambitions and became an ordinary or, as they say in such cases, normal prosperous country. At that time, the Swedes even came up with some sort of interactive activity for children: they were given the opportunity to play out the Battle of Poltava and see if Charles had a chance of victory. It turned out that he had no way of winning, no matter how you play, you still could not defeat the Russians. Today, such a joint project with Sweden would not work. Swedish historiography has for many years taken a nationalistic and anti-Russian stance, as if the Battle of Poltava had only just ended...

– Peter turned Russia into a great power, into an empire, imposing a rather serious and practically permanent “imperial burden” upon it. How do you feel about that?

– As historical destiny. Because Russia is not Sweden. Our country doesn’t have any natural borders and therefore it’s doomed to be something like an empire – bigger, smaller, to whatever extent, but an empire. Peter realized that. Otherwise, it would have disintegrated. However, for all the greatness of his figure, I still think, having been educated along Marxist lines as a historian, that he acted in conformity with a certain logic of the historical process.

Multipolarity Peter’s way

– What else is planned for this year?

– Altogether, we have a big anniversary programme, but perhaps the main event at the end of the year will be a tremendous exhibition of Peter’s costumes. We have a new costume repository at Staraya Derevnya, where unique conditions have been created for displaying the Tsar’s outfits. The Hermitage does indeed have an enormous collection, and we have restored a great many items for the anniversary year – including costumes considered ruined and lost forever. We thought we would never show them –that it was neither decent nor possible – and we couldn’t do anything with them. However, it turned out that with today’s technology, you can. That’s why there will be a lot of costumes in the exhibition which we would simply never have shown in the state they once were in. So, it’s an absolutely wonderful exhibition, and it will have that combination of simplicity and chic so typical of Peter. There will be some very strange outfits too – the costumes of the members of his All-Drunken Synod, for example.

– Is the core of the exhibition Peter’s own costumes?

– Yes, Peter’s own. A huge wardrobe of his clothing has survived. By the way, it’s not just the Hermitage that has costumes of the Reformer Tsar. Usually everyone talks about Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, saying she had hundreds of dresses. Not much remains of those hundreds of dresses, though. Meanwhile, there are a great many of Peter’s costumes. Just appreciate that moment in time: when he died, he was almost a saint, but, since in reality church customs were already a bit blunted, all of that affected the posthumous fate of the first emperor’s belongings – people began collecting relics associated with him.

Well, and recently, as I said, we opened an exhibition in the Moorish Hall devoted to China. It’s called “Exotic and Lavish China”. The Moorish Hall was chosen for a reason. Remember the Moor of Peter the Great, whose descendant was Alexander Pushkin... In fact, new aspects of the story of Abram Hannibal are now being perceived. Against a background where everyone in Europe and America is repenting of the way they oppressed Black people, the story involving Peter the Great is being seen in a completely different light. There was hardly anything like it in Europe. About two years ago. the Historical Museum in Amsterdam held an exhibition dedicated to Black African topics, oppression and all the rest, and the whole thing started with a portrait of Hannibal in gorgeous clothes – not a slave on the plantations or in the galleys, but one of the Russian tsar’s closest associates. Hence the Moorish Hall.

Formal costume of Peter the Great with the sash of the Order of St Andrew. 1724

There will be a series of small exhibitions - each lasting three months. Different subjects. The one running now is China. Then there will be “Peter’s Diplomatic Gifts” – covering all his diplomacy. Then there will be sculpture from his collection. It’s amazing because he was very active in buying up Italian sculpture! And finally, an exhibition of books printed during Peter the Great’s time.

The “Chinese” exhibition is wonderful because, well, firstly, it’s very topical, and secondly, we keep saying that Peter represented the European choice for Russia, which was firmly and forcibly imposed, and proved to be the right one. Yet there was already a certain counterweight and balance involving the Orient, and our exhibition shows how many amazing things the Emperor received as gifts from China. It reminds us how many embassies there were, how many agreements were concluded –- ones which are still important and relevant today, and how many Chinese things Peter bought himself. The young Peter moreover. We have an engraving of a room in Francis Lefort’s palace which is hung all over with Chinese fabrics. And, by the way, the first Russian military standards were made of Chinese silk...

– Multipolarity 18th-century style?

– In a sense, with adjustments for time and place, as they say. I think Peter was always aware of that. From the outside, he might have appeared to bow down to the West, but in reality he did what he wanted. Relevant here is the amazing story of the Taurida Venus. Two stories even, and both tell of that quality in Peter. As is well known, that statue was bought for him in Rome, but the Pope forbade its export because it was an antiquity, a rarity. Then there’s the yarn about how Peter eventually got it. Allegedly, through his representatives, the Pope offered to exchange the Venus for the relics of Saint Bridget, a Catholic saint born in Sweden. For these relics, the Papal See was supposedly prepared to exchange a sculpture of a pagan goddess. Although it was impossible to obtain these relics because they were on Swedish territory, the Venus somehow still ended up in Russia. In other words, by some means the Russians managed to outwit the Catholics.

But there is another version, considered more credible, according to which there were in fact negotiations about the tsar allowing Jesuit preachers to travel through his realm to China. Peter agreed, and in return was presented with the Taurida Venus. It seems very likely that this was indeed the case. However, the Jesuits did not get to China in the end, because the Chinese emperor banned them from entering the country. Meanwhile, we had already received the Venus. Peter got his way.

“He will remain a guiding light.”

– Debates about Peter have been going on for 300 years. For some he built a city on bones, for others he raised up a great city. For some, he was a genius, for others a tyrant. What do you personally like about him, and what, on the contrary, puts you off?

– Peter built our city, and you are absolutely right, it is a great city. In my opinion, it was his most important accomplishment because the building of Saint Petersburg played a huge role in the history of Russia. Therefore, just for the creation of the city on the Neva, I think very well of Peter – respectfully and with love. As for his bloody, brutal rule... But it has always been like that in Russia. I don’t know, maybe Catherine II before Pugachev was more peaceful than others, but then she became exactly the same. And regarding the city built on bones – no more of them were laid down than in the construction of any major city at that time.

Although, of course, I won’t conceal that I wouldn’t want to have dealings with him personally, either as a museum director or in any other capacity. I think he was a difficult man to interact with. Although in general, there aren’t that many historical figures I would want to associate with. Having said that, Peter remained a guiding light for a long time. People have looked, do look and always will look to him – Catherine the Great and Nicholas I. Even in the Soviet Union, he was the only tsar who was revered and not vilified. Post-Soviet Russia is also guided by him.

– Post-Soviet Russia actually began with the renaming of Leningrad into St Petersburg.

– Yes, and that too was done by a resolute effort, in Peter’s spirit, because in fact the referendum on renaming the city did not produce an unambiguous result. Opinions were divided almost equally, and indeed that wasn’t what the referendum was about. Still, the decision was made in Peter’s spirit, in defiance of everything – let it be Saint Petersburg! And now, when we are building a new Russia, we are again looking to Peter, trying to understand what is happening to us.

– Do you have a favourite monument to Peter? Is it the Bronze Horseman or not, all the same?

– No, not the Bronze Horseman. I happened to walk by it again just recently: it’s remarkable, of course, there aren’t any other monuments like that. Yet I like our wax persona better. And I am also really fond of Rastrelli’s monument near Saint Michael’s Castle. That one pleases me a lot - grand, imperial, conveying the character of Peter himself.

The First Winter Palace

Peter the Great had four successive residences from the time when Saint Petersburg was founded. First he lived in a log cabin near the Peter and Paul Fortress, then in a slightly larger, but still wooden, house on the site of the present-day Hermitage Theatre, and after his marriage to Catherine he moved into the masonry Wedding Chambers built in the same place. That modest building could not compete with the luxurious palaces of the nobility that were springing up around it. Following Peter’s orders, in 1716 the German architect Georg Mattarnovi started to build a new royal palace alongside, near the Winter Canal. The two-storey building facing the Neva was embellished with a coat of arms surmounted by a crown. Its halls and apartments were finished with red marble and oak panelling. Although the architect died at the height of construction work, the palace was completed in 1720 and named the Winter Palace – in distinction to the Summer Palace in the Summer Garden. Admittedly, even before the tsar moved in, it had become clear that the palace would be extended, and in 1723 the new part was built, in which Peter died. After that, work continued on the palace, but it was abandoned when the court moved to Moscow. Under Empress Elizabeth, the barracks of the Life Guards Company were located there, and towards the end of the 18th century the Hermitage Theatre was erected on the site.

The original Russian text of the interview can be found here.