Russian Museum

• 1. Introduction

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  The State Russian Museum sits on Arts Square in Saint Petersburg, holding the world's largest collection of Russian fine art. Spread across more than 30 hectares, it draws visitors from every corner of the globe. In 2022 alone, more than two and a half million people passed through its doors, placing it twelfth among the most-visited art museums on earth. But this institution did not begin as a monument to culture. It began as an act of grief.

  The story opens in 1896, when a newly crowned emperor named Nicholas II signed the order that would establish this museum to honor his recently dead father, Alexander III. The collection that filled it was not purchased or commissioned from scratch. It was assembled by raiding the Hermitage, the Alexander Palace, and the Imperial Academy of Arts. A man named Vasily Svinyin was given the task of reworking the palace interiors to suit the needs of a public exhibition. Two years would pass before the doors finally opened.

  What happened inside those walls over the following century is a story of revolution, survival, nationalization, and relentless restoration. It is also the story of a building that outlived its original owners many times over, and a collection that kept growing in ways no emperor could have anticipated.

• 2. The Palace Behind the Museum

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  Carlo Rossi designed the Mikhailovsky Palace between 1819 and 1825, and the result was one of the finest Neoclassical buildings in Saint Petersburg. Its original occupant was Grand Duke Michael Pavlovich, a member of the imperial family. When the Grand Duke died, the residence was renamed after his wife, becoming the Palace of the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, and it gained a reputation as a venue for theatrical presentations and balls. Some of the halls still carry that earlier life inside them, with Italianate interiors that have survived every change of regime.

  The museum's footprint was never limited to a single building. The Benois Building, known in Russian as Corpus Benua, was planned between 1910 and 1912 by the architect Leon Benois. Construction began in 1914, then stopped when the First World War intervened. It was finally completed in 1919, after the Revolution had already transformed Russia's political landscape, and was formally assigned to the museum in the 1930s.

  Beyond these two central structures, the Russian Museum oversees a remarkable set of satellite properties across Saint Petersburg. These include the Summer Palace of Peter I, built between 1710 and 1714 with its surrounding Summer Garden; the Marble Palace of Count Orlov, completed between 1768 and 1785; St Michael's Castle of Emperor Paul, raised between 1797 and 1801; the cabin of Peter the Great; and the Stroganov Palace on the Nevsky Prospekt, described as Rastrelliesque and built between 1752 and 1754.

• 3. Revolution and the New Collection

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  After 1917, the Revolution did not destroy the museum. It enlarged it. Private collections that had belonged to wealthy families and individuals were nationalized by the new Soviet government and redirected to public institutions, and the Russian Museum received a significant share. Among the works that arrived by this route was Kazimir Malevich's Black Square, one of the most debated paintings in the history of modern art.

  The Ethnographic Department tells a different story of expansion. Originally housed in a building designed by Vladimir Svinyin and opened in 1902, it began by displaying gifts that foreign peoples of the Russian Empire had presented to the imperial family. Nicholas II and other members of the family used personal funds to supplement state financing, purchasing additional exhibits when the government budget fell short. By 1934, the department had grown substantial enough to be spun off as a fully independent institution, the Russian Museum of Ethnography.

  Through these decades, the museum's leadership changed with the country's political currents. Grand Duke Georgy Mikhailovich Romanov had directed it from 1895 until 1917. From that point the role passed through a series of appointed directors, each serving through different periods of Soviet history, until Vladimir Alexandrovich Gusev held the position from 1988 through 2023. Alla Yuryevna Manilova took over from the 25th of April 2023.

• 4. The Art of Saving Art

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  As early as 1906, voices inside the museum were calling for a dedicated restoration workshop. The artist and restorer A. Boravskiy drew up a formal project at that time, but the funds were never found. Sixteen years passed before the idea became a reality. In 1922 the restoration workshop finally opened, with the painter-restorer N.A. Okolovich serving as its first director. From the beginning it ran two parallel operations: one working directly for the museum, and one reaching out to save cultural monuments across Petrograd and other Russian cities.

  By 1935, the department had grown complex enough to be divided into specialized laboratories. Sculpture, applied art, folk art, and different categories of painting each received their own section. More workshops followed in the decades after, each addressing a specific material or technique. A graphic arts restoration workshop opened in 1953. Old Russian painting got its own dedicated space in 1954. Workshops for wooden sculpture and textile restoration arrived in 1961, and a studio for plaster and stone sculpture opened in 1969.

  Today the restoration service employs 95 people across 16 workshops, covering materials from ceramics and glassware to metalwork and contemporary art objects. The contemporary art objects workshop was established as recently as 2010, a sign of how the museum's responsibilities keep expanding. In 2014, the department restored 4,511 exhibits, of which 280 were identified as requiring special complexity. That same year, more than five thousand additional exhibits were prepared for 77 different museum exhibitions worldwide.

• 5. From Tobacco Factory to Russian Icon

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  In March 2015, a building that once processed tobacco in the Spanish city of Malaga became the first overseas branch of the State Russian Museum. Malaga was chosen in part because thousands of Russian expatriates had made their home there. The city had signed a formal agreement with the museum to host the branch, and the exhibition space inside La Tabacalera, a factory dating to the 1920s, runs to 2,300 square meters. Works on display stretch from Byzantine-inspired icons to the social realism of the Soviet era, a range that echoes the full sweep of the main Saint Petersburg collection.

  Back in Russia, the museum's collection today covers Russian art from the 10th century through the 21st, with every genre represented from early icon painting to contemporary work. That span of more than a thousand years of visual culture, housed partly in a Neoclassical palace and partly in a former imperial residence, reflects the cumulative weight of the institution's history. The fact that a 1920s Spanish tobacco factory now shares the museum's identity offers one measure of how far its reach has traveled since Nicholas II signed the founding order in 1896.