On 5 September 2019, the Victory Museum in Moscow was the setting for the All-Russian open lesson “I remember”. Participating in it were Olga Vasilyeva, Minister of Education of the Russian Federation, Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, Alexander Shkolnik, Director of the Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War, and Sergei Baladiuk, founder of the ELAR corporation.
This year the lesson was devoted to professions that help to preserve memory and heritage – historians, museum and archive workers, archaeologists and restorers, digitizers of historical documents and many others.
Mikhail Piotrovsky spoke about the Hermitage’s great feat during the siege of Leningrad, about the life of the museum and its staff in that grave time: “A museum exists, even if war is raging. Although it was closed to visitors, the Hermitage was working – it preserved what remained within it. The staff preserved the stocks that had not been evacuated. They had to grab and extinguish incendiary bombs and put out the fires that broke out. They had to block up the doorways and windows when they were all broken and see to it that order was maintained. That was only one part of what they did –that’s normal museum work. They also had to do the main thing that a museum does – engage in scholarship. They told each other what they had managed to discover and study during their times on duty so that if they died the knowledge would be left. They organized some fantastic things that were supposed to show everyone and prove that the museum was alive. They organized evenings in memory of Nizami and Nava'i – two great Eastern poets. Across the country, around the world those notable anniversaries were not celebrated – people had more pressing concerns. They brought scholars back from the front specially so that the inhabitants of the city, the inhabitants of the Soviet Union, people around the world would see what intellectual power is, what the historical memory is that the museum preserves. They thought up guided tours around the empty frames that acted as symbols of the art that had to come back. A museum worker should tell about the greatness, the memory of which he or she preserves, and do so in such a way that it stays in people’s minds. During the war the Hermitage staff managed that, and the formula arose: the Heroic Deed of the Hermitage.”
In his talk, the Hermitage Director also touched on the subject of modern technologies: they are extensively used and are being introduced not only in the Hermitage, but in other museums as well. State-of-the-art equipment ought to stress the significance of a thing, help to tell about what is invisible to the unaided eye. At the same time, we need to remember that “all technologies are a shadow, a shadow of what there is in the real object: as Shvarts wrote – “Shadow, know thy place, if there is a person alongside.’”
When asked how someone gets a job in the Hermitage, Mikhail Piotrovsky answered, “The Hermitage is a very special museum and so as to work there you need to love it very much. But at the same time the Hermitage needs to love you too.”
A video of the open lesson
