The emperor

Mikhail Piotrovsky has headed the Hermitage for 33 of his 80 years. His entire life has been tied up with the museum, with his father, Professor Boris Piotrovsky, directing the institution from 1964 until his death in 1990.

Empire built

Piotrovsky was appointed Director of the Hermitage in 1992 at the age of 47, relatively young for a position of such stature. He was simply installed in the role, although many other museums, including St. Petersburg’s other major institutions like the Russian Museum, were by now selecting their directors through staff votes.

Nevertheless, Piotrovsky’s arrival inspired great expectations, many of which he would go on to fulfill. Art historian Kira Dolinina, former editor-in-chief of Hermitage magazine and long-time art critic for Russian daily Kommersant, recalls: “By 1993, when I first met him, he seemed a very promising figure: young, undoubtedly well-educated, and at ease among foreign colleagues. He embodied the liberal face of post-Perestroika Russia.”

On the cultural world stage, the Hermitage is not merely a great museum; it is one of the few truly “universal” museums that encompass the full span of world culture, from ancient Sumer to the present day. Fewer than a dozen such museums exist: among them are the Louvre in Paris, the Prado in Madrid, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and the British Museum in London.

On his arrival, Piotrovsky presented himself as the intellectual who grasped this immense responsibility and was ready to take on the challenge.

Empire grows

The young Piotrovsky seemed a perfect match for the young Russian state, charting a course toward openness and modernisation. His first major step in that direction, Dolinina recalls, addressed one of the most sensitive issues of the time — restitution. Russian museums were uncertain what to do with the masterpieces brought to the Soviet Union by the Red Army from defeated Germany after the war. Their legal status was murky, and German institutions sought to reclaim them as unlawfully seized property.

“The restitution story became a kind of litmus test that made Piotrovsky known across Europe,” Dolinina remembers. “He declared that the Hermitage was ready to exhibit these works and, most importantly, to allow Western scholars to study them.”

In 1995, the Hermitage unveiled Unknown Masterpieces, an exhibition of works taken from German private collections.

“It was an explosion of unimaginable scale,” says Dolinina. “Directors of German museums came, as did descendants of the original owners. Later, Russia adopted a law on restitution that made it nearly impossible to return anything, but Piotrovsky had already become a symbol of openness.”

That view is shared by artist Marina Koldobskaya, former director of the St. Petersburg branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Art, which has collaborated extensively with the Hermitage.

Before Piotrovsky, she recalls, the Hermitage was deeply conservative.

“It was like a temple where priests in white robes guarded the sacred treasures. Piotrovsky, however, was someone acutely attuned to the spirit of the times. He understood that the museum needed to face life, and he brought modernity into the Hermitage.”

Under his leadership, the museum hosted major exhibitions by world-renowned contemporary artists such as Cy Twombly, Bill Viola, George Segal, and Louise Bourgeois.

In 2009, the Hermitage opened its Department of Contemporary Art, the Hermitage 20/21 project, led by Dmitry Ozerkov, a young art historian of international repute. The new department organised shows of major names in the world of art, icons of modern art from leading museums worldwide, and began building its own collection. In 2014, the Hermitage hosted Manifesta, one of Europe’s leading contemporary art biennials.

Empire shaken

It is hard to imagine any state-funded project in Russia entirely free from corruption, kickbacks, or misappropriation. Nor has the Hermitage been immune, with accusations surfacing periodically over the years.

The most prominent case came in 2013, when the State Audit Chamber uncovered large-scale embezzlement during the restoration of several Hermitage buildings. Contract costs had been unjustifiably inflated, and the estimated damage exceeded six billion rubles (approximately €65 million). Several individuals involved in the project were arrested, among them a Culture Ministry official, Boris Mazo, who was later sentenced to eight years in prison.

In 2021, investigative outlet Proekt reported that a number of businesses closely tied to the Hermitage belonged to friends of the Piotrovsky family. Yet acquaintances describe the family’s lifestyle as relatively modest.

Dolinina, who followed the investigations into the museum’s finances, notes: “Personally, I didn’t see any major abuse in the 1990s, though journalists were looking. The questionable deals came later, in the 2000s and 2010s, and mostly concerned government contracts. Mikhail Piotrovsky’s story isn’t about money, it’s about power.”

Empire sealed

Over the decades, Piotrovsky’s achievements, both on behalf of the Hermitage and on the international cultural stage, became undeniable. He received numerous honours, Russian and foreign alike, and deservedly so. Perhaps, over time, he began to merge with the museum itself, coming to see it as his own domain.

In many ways, that was a strength. Everyone knew that Piotrovsky would defend the Hermitage against any attack as if it were his own home. He cared deeply for the old guard, the museum’s veterans, keeping them employed as long as possible and never abandoning them. He truly saw himself as the master of the house, and guarded it at any cost.

Yet as the years passed, Piotrovsky grew increasingly authoritarian, and the effects began to show within the institution. Career advancement slowed, and he became a more withdrawn leader, one who failed to nurture a successor or a new generation of directors.

“The young people at the Hermitage are the museum’s hope,” says a St. Petersburg art historian who asked to remain anonymous. “They’re intelligent, well-educated, each with their own strategies, temperaments, and ideals, but they have no prospects. In the Hermitage, as in the old Communist Party, you must climb every rung of the ladder. It’s a long, exhausting path.”

“Gradually, we began to notice that he was taking more and more decisions into his own hands,” recalls Dolinina. “More issues could only be resolved in his office, and fewer young employees were allowed to participate in discussions.”

Piotrovsky became increasingly irritable and less inclined to listen. He began losing people, especially younger staff. Once, working at the Hermitage had meant a lifelong vocation; now, talented curators and researchers were leaving, realising that career growth had stalled and opportunities elsewhere were more promising. He failed to notice the shift in time. As a result, says Dolinina, the Hermitage began to stagnate.

“In the 2010s, Moscow’s Pushkin Museum was putting on major, spectacular exhibitions like Caravaggio,” Dolinina explains. “The Hermitage didn’t even try. Piotrovsky believed it was already great enough. In his mind, the word Hermitage had grown into something so vast and eternal that it no longer needed to do anything, merely to exist.”

He also began playing an active role in politics, publicly backing Vladimir Putin during the presidential elections of 2012, 2018, and 2024.

The Hermitage had the potential to bring in visitors for centuries. People will never tire of coming to see the masterpieces of Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Rubens, after all. The potential of its director, too, might have endured, protecting and expanding the museum’s legacy, if only Russia hadn’t gone to war with Ukraine, and the country’s leadership hadn’t demanded a public oath of loyalty from everyone within its orbit.

Empire at war

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, prompting a wave of sanctions from the West. The initial response to sanctions was chaotic, and museums struggled to understand whether the economic measures applied to their activities.

The Hermitage ran into problems returning works from European exhibitions via Finland: some shipments were stuck at customs, and lawyers from both countries negotiated for a time over whether museum objects were subject to sanctions. All the works were eventually returned, but in June 2022 the Hermitage announced a moratorium on all loans from its collections to “unfriendly countries”, a day before the Culture Ministry imposed a similar freeze on all Russian museums.

Attention focused on Piotrovsky’s June 2022 interview with state-funded daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta. In it, the Hermitage director described overseas exhibitions as a “cultural special operation, a powerful cultural offensive”, condemned attempts to “cancel” Russian cultural initiatives abroad without mentioning the reason, noted that the museum had compiled its own “blacklist” of potential partners, and declared that he would always stand with his country, no matter what it did. In effect, he justified the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“On the one hand, war is blood and killing, and on the other, it is the self-assertion of people, the self-assertion of a nation. Every person wants to assert themselves. And in taking a position towards the war, one undeniably asserts oneself. Besides, we are all raised in the imperial tradition, and an empire unites many peoples, bringing people together through shared and important things,” Piotrovsky said at the time.

The St. Petersburg intelligentsia, largely liberal and anti-war, had long regarded Piotrovsky as “one of their own”, a carrier, even embodiment, of European values, who built the Hermitage as part of an international culture. Those who read the Rossiyskaya Gazeta interview described their reaction in one word: shock.

A longtime collaborator with the Hermitage and its director recalled: “With all his power and influence, he could have said to journalists: ‘I’m 78, I’m sick, go to hell.’ Why did he do this?”. Others asked the same question.

Some speculated that had Piotrovsky spoken out against the war, his contract might not have been renewed. On the other hand, given his age, did that really matter? As the St. Petersburg art historian noted, authorities could have “come after him” over questionable contracts during construction projects. But at the start of the war, the scale of repression was not yet extreme, and Piotrovsky was largely untouchable.

Reaction to Piotrovsky’s statements in 2022 was unequivocal: “He ruined his own obituary.” And the museum suffered along with him.

Ozerkov, widely seen as a potential future director of the Hermitage, left Russia and declared he could no longer work in a museum whose director supported the war in Ukraine. Many other, less famous but equally talented specialists quietly resigned.

“It’s a tragic story: a man who accomplished so much slowly became an autocrat, and then a sycophant. If he had stepped down in spring 2022, no one would have done anything to him,” Dolinina asserts.

This August, shortly before his reappointment, Piotrovsky gave another major interview to Rossiyskaya Gazeta. He announced that the Hermitage would introduce priority benefits for participants of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, circumventing existing student and school privileges. He also reported that the museum had hosted a fashion show for clothing adapted for people with disabilities, primarily those involved in the war, and promised that the Hermitage’s programming would include a “patriotic triad”, namely “Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality” — the official ideology of the Russian Empire.