Implicit Messages in Museum Communications:

The Case of the State Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg, Russia, 1917–1980

Alice West

A Capstone in the Field of Museum Studies

for the Degree of Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies

Harvard University

Extension School

May 2019

Table of Contents

List of Figures ...... iii Author’s Statement ...... iv Introduction ...... 1 Methodology ...... 3 Background ...... 5 The Museum as a Private Collection: Communications before the October Revolution of 1917 ...... 5 Acknowledgements and Introductions ...... 6 Language and Writing Style ...... 9 Treatment of Religious Subjects ...... 10 Guiding the Visitor ...... 12 Summary ...... 12 The Museum in Transition: Communications in the First Decade after the Revolution (1917–1927) ...... 13 Writing Style and Treatment of Religious Subjects ...... 15 Introductions ...... 16 Ignoring Politics ...... 17 Summary ...... 19 The Museum as a Factory of Political Education: Communications in Stalin’s Time (1928–1955) ...... 19 Replacing the Staff ...... 20 Incorporating Marxist Social Theory ...... 21 Developing a New Language ...... 24 Authority Figures and Markers ...... 26 Treatment of Religious Subjects ...... 27 Educating the Visitor ...... 30 Definition of the Museum Visitor ...... 31

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Summary ...... 32 The Museum as a Place for Aesthetic Education: Communications during Khrushchev’s Liberalization (1955–1964) ...... 33 Developing a New Language ...... 35 Authority Figures and Markers ...... 40 Educating the Visitor ...... 40 Definition of the Museum Visitor Finalized ...... 43 Summary ...... 46 Professionalization of the Museum: Communications during Stagnation (1964–1980) ...... 47 Authority Figures and Markers ...... 48 Treatment of Religious Subjects ...... 50 Summary ...... 53 Conclusions ...... 54 Works Cited ...... 58

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List of Figures

Fig. 1. Da Conegliano, Cima. The Annunciation ...... 10

Fig. 2. Da Vinci, Leonardo. The Litta Madonna ...... 11

Fig. 3. Van Rijn, Rembrandt Harmenszoon. Holy Family...... 29

Fig. 4. Da Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi. The Lute Player...... 45

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Author’s Statement

This paper is the culmination of my four years in the Museum Studies program. The

Museum Studies program decomposes museums into a logical framework that enables one to study, analyze, and optimize the functions of museums and related institutions.

This program caused me to look at museums in a new way. In my case, I grew up in

St. Petersburg, Russia, near the Hermitage Museum, where I studied art for six years. In this regard, the Hermitage was the archetypal museum against which I applied all the new ideas I learned in the program.

In Mary Malloy’s class, the Role of Museums in History, she taught us to consider how museums change with respect to current times, cultural trends, economics, or political environments. Reflecting on the Hermitage in this light, I thought I saw patterns in its publications. With Mary’s encouragement, I began to correlate specific changes in museum publications and political changes in the USSR. It was clear that there was a deeper subject to explore. This paper is the result of that exercise.

I want to thank not only Mary Malloy, but also Katherine B. Jones who supported me in pursuing this topic as my capstone. Lastly, Donald Ostrowski, as my reader, had valuable comments and insight into Russian history.

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Introduction

Over a hundred years ago, the Soviet Union transformed its largest museum, the State

Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg, into an institution of social engineering. Museum communications were central to this transformation. By incorporating implicit messages in its communications, the Hermitage shaped the worldview of its visitors as directed by the government.

The term communications here includes not just museum publications, but anything we can derive meaning from, for example, names given to paintings or artworks selected for tours.

The term social engineering implies efforts to influence the perceptions and values of large groups of people. In the context of this research, social engineering should not be construed exclusively as political propaganda, but rather as a broader concept that also encompasses cultural, ethical, and aesthetic education. Finally, implicit messages generate meaning that is not expressed openly, but is inferred. Implicit messages are widely used in all spheres of life to influence and inform audiences. These messages are especially interesting, because they can encode non-verbalized phenomena, such as policy intent or cultural attitudes.

There are at least two important reasons to explore the subject of implicit messages in museums. First, previous research has shown that implicit messages have a powerful impact on public perceptions (see, for example, McKenzie et al.; Whalen et al.; and Chang et al.), yet the potential for the use of implicit messages in museums has not been recognized or studied sufficiently. The Hermitage provides a case study of such use. From 1917 to 1980, the Hermitage consistently promoted government policies through implicit messages in its communications and developed a variety of effective ways to deliver these messages to museum visitors. Controlled by the government, the same implicit messages were generated across a broad spectrum of 1

Hermitage communications. This consistency provides a basis for reconstructing the implicit messages and the methods of their delivery at the Hermitage. At a minimum, the example of the

Hermitage may help museums recognize the power of implicit messages and encourage their use by museums in a systematic and deliberate way. Beyond this, positive implicit messages can be incorporated by museums into their public service messaging using the methodology developed by the Hermitage.

Second, popular museum literature has been largely overlooked as historical documents.

Indeed, the purpose of such literature is to orient visitors in a particular museum. As museums change and our understanding of arts and sciences develops, museum literature becomes obsolete. In other words, museum literature is generally valued for its explicit information about the museums. Yet implicit messages contained in it encode the nonverbalized historical, social, and cultural realities of their time. Unfortunately, being time- and culture-specific, this implicit language quickly becomes forgotten, as succeeding generations develop their own. The

Hermitage Museum is no exception. The implicit language of its communications is no longer understood by the younger generations. This process accelerated after the collapse of the Soviet

Union, when the country’s political, economic, and social life radically changed. Now more than ever, this language requires study and interpretation. It holds original evidence of the history of the Soviet Union, which helps thwart persistent attempts to revise this history. It also opens up the worldview of the people who lived back then, revealing the entire spectrum of political and cultural perceptions, which shaped their future back then and our present today.

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Methodology

The primary sources used in this research are limited to general publications by or about the Hermitage Museum from about the 1900s to 1980, such as catalogs, guidebooks, and floor plans. Scholarly publications are excluded from the research, as they differ from the general publications in goals, audience, and the extent of government control. Scholarly publications conform to the rules, traditions, and terminology defined by scholarly requirements, which are difficult to change without losing credibility. As a result, scholarly publications are less suitable as conduits of government policy. Further, because of their rigid vocabulary and style, they provide less opportunity to develop implicit messages, which is the focus of this research.

Due to time and space limitations, the project excludes certain types of communications, such as radio shows, lecture series, and postage products produced by the Hermitage, among others.

Further, the project explores only selected methods for the delivery of implicit messages, based on two criteria: the method must be used in Hermitage communications across two or more historical periods and must provide clear and convincing examples.

Comparative textual analysis is the primary method of this research. It is a method of comparing similar texts and establishing reasons for their differences. Here, comparative textual analysis is applied to the same or similar Hermitage communications from different historical periods. The analysis looks for correlations between significant changes in government policy and changes in structural, content, and stylistic elements of Hermitage communications.

Onomastic analysis interprets the changes in the names of the Hermitage’s artworks, departments, and galleries, and looks for correlations between these changes and the changes in government policy. 3

Literature about the Hermitage published before the revolution of 1917 serves as a benchmark in the analysis of the publications from the first decade after the revolution. After this initial analysis, publications and other types of communications from the subsequent periods are compared with each other.

To ensure consistency, the analysis focuses on key religious paintings from the

Hermitage’s European collection. Religious art presented a particular problem for the new atheistic state, the Soviet Union, which replaced the Orthodox Russian Empire in 1917. The government’s policy demanded atheistic interpretations of the religious subjects in the art at the

Hermitage. Because of this apparent contradiction, communications related to the religious art became especially productive for developing implicit messages. Further, the Hermitage’s world- famous paintings by such artists as Leonardo or Rembrandt provide a consistent basis for comparison, as they appear in all general Hermitage guidebooks.

Finally, while the project methodology reveals a strong policy-message correlation, there are notable exceptions. For example, the personality of Joseph Orbeli, director of the Hermitage from 1934 to 1951, determined the character of some popular publications during this period.

While important from the historical point of view, these exceptions are nonsystematic and lie outside the project’s focus. Also, to keep the size manageable, the project excludes a number of significant museum policy areas with their own implicit messages. These are, for example, a synthetic approach to museum exhibitions, combining audio, visual, and other elements in the interpretation of art, and many innovations of the 1920s and 1930s that were significantly ahead of their time, including displaying works of art in their indigenous modeled environments with information about the people who used them, training for schoolteachers, or archeology and art history programs for children. 4

Background

The foundation of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, dates back to

1764, when Empress Catherine II purchased a large collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings for her residence, the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Over the course of the 19th century, buildings were added to accommodate the growing collection, now called the Imperial

Hermitage. While remaining the private collection of the tsars, the Imperial Hermitage buildings were opened in the mid–19th century as a museum with limited ticketed attendance and its own director (Piotrovskii, Istoriia 21, 44-52). The Winter Palace remained the residence of the tsars inaccessible to the public until the February Bourgeois Democratic Revolution of 1917, when the tsar abdicated and the Winter Palace was turned into the seat of the Provisional Government of

Russia. The Provisional Government, however, lasted only eight months until the October

Socialist Revolution of 1917 replaced it with the Soviet government, which combined the

Imperial Hermitage and the Winter Palace into a public museum known today as the State

Hermitage. Thus, from the very beginning, the State Hermitage acquired a dual significance as the largest museum in the country and as a symbol of the October Socialist Revolution. This duality is important, because of its impact on the Hermitage’s communications.

The Museum as a Private Collection: Communications before the October

Revolution of 1917

The Imperial Hermitage did not have any program of public communications. The museum administration allowed only a limited number of organized tours, because “it believed that the Hermitage was visited by those who understand art and do not require any guidance”

(Piotrovskii Ermitazh 69). As part of this policy, the Hermitage’s professional staff prepared 5

museum catalogs, while the general guidebooks were published by private firms in cooperation with artists, historians, or writers, like Dmitrii Grigorovich or Alexandre Benois. Although produced by very different people, the Hermitage’s popular and professional literature had common elements, which generated implicit messages of cultural norms and aesthetics of the period. These elements disappeared after the October Revolution, each in its own time. Some of them are described below and serve as benchmarks for the comparison of the later periods.

Acknowledgements and Introductions

Acknowledgements, or personal expressions of gratitude by the author, were a common feature of the Imperial Hermitage’s publications in this period. Acknowledgements varied from a short dedication to a page or more, which described, in appreciative terms, the contribution of the author’s predecessor or advisor, his efforts, or facts from his biography related to the publication.

For example, Andrei Somov, chief curator of the Imperial Hermitage Painting Collection in

1886–1909 (Kachalina et al. 136) compiled a major catalog of the collection in 1899, in which he acknowledged his predecessor, Baron Briuiningk, who started the cataloging effort and whose work Somov built upon (Somov xxvii). In the 1912 edition of this catalog, Ernst Liphart, registrar of the Painting Collection in 1906–1929 (Kachalina et al. 98), acknowledged both

Briuiningk and Somov by detailing the history of their efforts (41-42), and also expressed “deep gratitude to those [colleagues from London, Milan, Berlin, and Madrid], who kindly offered their assistance and advice to make this publication possible” (48). In the 1911 guidebook to the

Imperial Hermitage, artist Alexandre Benois thanked Somov for the “invaluable service of researching, systematizing, and inventorying the enormous Hermitage collection” (Putevoditel’ iv); Alexander Neustroev thanked Somov in his 1898 guidebook for “kindly reviewing” it and 6

also for Somov’s “experience and comments,” which contributed to the edition (v); and Nikolai

Makarenko stated in the introduction to his 1916 guidebook that it was his “pleasant duty to express sincere gratitude to all those, who helped . . . and especially to coworkers at the Imperial

Hermitage” (iv).

Acknowledgements recognized individuals important to the authors, but not necessarily to the government. They represented the author’s claim to the publication, as well as personal relationships between the author and those he thanked. All this became undesirable after the

October Revolution of 1917, when the government began to use museum publications as a tool to promote its own political and cultural agendas. From then on, it was solely the government and its ideological leaders, whether living or deceased, who could claim the ownership of

Hermitage literature and were acknowledged in it.

Another common part of Imperial Hermitage publications were lengthy introductions, where the authors directly addressed their readers and explained the goals of their publications.

These goals varied widely and depended on the authors’ personal missions as museum educators.

For example, art historian and mystic Vera Konradi strived to “educate the eye” and develop

“aesthetic sensibilities” in the visitors:

This book is not for art connoisseurs or professionals, but for those visitors to the

Hermitage who, when wandering its beautiful galleries, are lost in the multitude of

chaotic impressions and take with them but tiredness and boredom rather than

gratification. My goal is to help these visitors sort out their cultural encounters,

experience the ecstasy of artistic beauty, and, finally, to partake in the great joy of art. . . .

Educating the eye and developing aesthetic sensibilities become especially important

here. Because of this goal, little historical or biographical information is provided. (i-ii) 7

In contrast, artist Alexandre Benois emphasized the need for a broad historical analysis when talking about art in his guidebook:

We have selected a historical approach as the most appropriate. . . . You can—indeed,

you should—look at the history of art as a grand common denominator for all countries

sharing the same cultural background. Great artistic emotional outbursts known to us as

the Renaissance, baroque, classicism, realism, and others were common to all of

European life over the past six hundred years and had but slight differences resulting

from their particular geographic location. (Putevoditel’ 2)

Dmitrii Ivanov developed his 1904 Explanatory Guidebook to replace the German and

French language guidebooks to the Imperial Hermitage that were popular among Russian visitors for lack of better Russian equivalents. In the introduction, Ivanov wrote: that “a similar description of the Hermitage in Russian may be useful,” because many Russian language guidebooks of the time lacked “explanations of what makes particular works of art special” and thus “caused confusion.” Also, the Russian public, who learned about art from foreign language guidebooks, was mispronouncing the names of the art works in Russian, which Ivanov hoped to correct (i). Even in such a formal publication as a catalog of paintings, Andrei Somov thought of the Hermitage’s visitors first and exhibited a sentiment similar to that of Ivanov: “Any art gallery, especially as large and valuable as the Hermitage, gains in its didactic potential if there is a description of the paintings it contains” (xxii-xxiii). Finally, Alexander Neustroev wanted his guidebook “to describe the schools of painting and their relationships” and “serve as a reference for those, who know little about the history of art” (v). This was very different from both Vera

Konradi, who focused on aesthetics, and Alexandre Benois, who considered the “so-called

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schools in art, which span centuries, a fiction” and passionately explained to his readers this unorthodox view (Putevoditel’ 2).

Language and Writing Style

In addition to having different goals and approaches to presenting art to the Hermitage’s visitors, these publications exhibited a variety of individual writing styles and deeply personal feelings of the authors towards the objects they described. Compare the three strikingly different descriptions of Cima da Conegliano’s The Annunciation (see fig. 1) from the Hermitage’s Italian painting collection. Curator Andrei Somov is dry and meticulous:

The Mother of God is kneeling at the pulpit, an open book in front of her. She has

stopped reading, bent her head to her right shoulder, cast her eyes down, and raised her

right hand in a gesture of surprise. An archangel in a white tunic with wings spread is

approaching the Ever-Virgin; he holds a blooming lily in his left hand, while his right

hand rests on his chest.” (146)

Alexandre Benois is expressive with the broad comparative focus of a practicing artist:

The event is rendered with superb simplicity. The angel walks in quickly; the Most Holy

Virgin listens to the annunciation with calmness and attention. She does not cast herself

down in ecstasy as in Botticelli, nor is she gripped with fear as in Giotto, or stunned as in

Lippo Lippi. (Putevoditel’ 22-23)

Vera Konradi paints an imaginative and sensitive image:

“Only the wings let us know that we see an angel and not a young Venetian girl, who ran

into the room and was embarrassed, because she interrupted the prayer of her elder

sister.” (14) 9

Fig. 1. Da Conegliano, Cima. The Annunciation. 1495, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg,

Russia. Wikimedia Commons, 2010, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cima_da_Conegliano_-

_The_Annunciation.jpg. Accessed 11 May 2019.

Treatment of Religious Subjects

According to the pre–1917 grammar rules, the Hermitage authors capitalized biblical terms, such as Savior, Crucifixion, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, Holy Family, and the Bible (Dal’ 103-

104; Buslaev 121). Also, following the Russian Orthodox tradition, the Hermitage authors commonly used two traditional names for the Virgin Mary, Bogomater (Mother of God) and

Bogoroditsa (Bearer of God). These names, with rare exceptions, appeared in the titles and descriptions of all Imperial Hermitage paintings, making the subject immediately recognizable to an Orthodox museum visitor. For example, a famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci known today as The Litta Madonna (see fig. 2) was listed as Bogoroditsa with Baby Jesus in all major

Imperial Hermitage catalogs, including by Somov (42), Liphart (115), Von Koene (8), and

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Kratkii katalog (Concise Catalog) (4). In guidebooks, a mixture of Madonna and the Orthodox

Bogomater was commonly used in informal descriptions (Makarenko 248-250; Neustroev 15;

Konradi 20). Madonna often appeared in the provenance context, as in the 1911 guidebook by

Benois: “The Litta Madonna was named so, because it belonged to the counts Litta in Milan.” A few lines later, however, Benois added: “The faces of Bogoroditsa and the Baby Jesus . . . should be attributed to Leonardo” (29). Also, all paintings featuring Madonna and Child were named, with no exceptions, either Bogomater with Baby Jesus or Bogomater with Baby Savior.

Fig. 2. Da Vinci, Leonardo. The Litta Madonna. Mid-1490s, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg,

Russia. Wikimedia Commons, 2010, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leonardo_da_Vinci_-

_The_Madonna_and_Child_(The_Litta_Madonna).jpg. Accessed 11 May 2019.

When describing religious subjects in art, the authors could be conservative or liberal in their interpretations and could display an array of emotions, from a deep religious feeling to a more distant view of religion as a national tradition or a romantic ideal, sometimes within the

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same publication. For example, Benois described Northern Gothic art as “a protest against the dull fear of the church” and at the same time praised it for having a “joyful trust in God and living in God” (Putevoditel’ 5). When commenting on the biblical or evangelical stories, these authors were comfortable with such common biblical terms as Israelites, Hebrews, or Jews. In

Cima da Conegliano’s The Annunciation, Mary’s bedposts were “decorated with Hebrew inscriptions” (Somov 146); Rembrandt’s Young Woman with Flowers (Flora) was previously called The Jewish Bride and Young Jewish Woman (Neustroev 206); and after Saskia’s death

“Rembrandt stayed in touch with only a few of his friends and Jewish neighbors, whose conversations might have deepened his understanding of the Bible” (Benois, Putevoditel’ 306).

Guiding the Visitor

The guidebooks for the Imperial Hermitage were intended for the upper and middle classes, who comprised the majority of museum visitors at the time. The authors assumed that these visitors were familiar with European languages, art terminology, Greek and Roman mythology, and the

Bible. Indeed, many of these subjects were part of the basic middle and high school program.

Thus, while providing historical and biographical facts related to artworks, no explanations of the subject matter, terminology, or foreign terms were offered, at least for European art, except for an occasional rare term.

Summary

The Imperial Hermitage’s publications were products of individual authors with their unique experiences, beliefs, temperaments, and goals. This personal aspect manifested itself in dedications, personal statements in the introductions, signing of the introductions, individual 12

writing style, and a wide variety of interpretations of the same artistic material, among other things. The personal aspect was strong regardless of whether the museum publications were produced by private initiative or commissioned by the Hermitage administration.

Implicitly, these publications encouraged their readers to appreciate diversity of opinions, the European perspective, and the contribution of the Judeo–Christian tradition to art. They also promoted a feeling of intimacy and trust with the authors, who shared the cultural background with their readers and addressed them in the language they understood. The October Revolution of 1917 removed the personal and private aspects from the museum’s communications and replaced their implicit messages with its own. These changes, however, did not happen immediately and had a different focus in different time periods.

The Museum in Transition: Communications in the First Decade after the Revolution

(1917–1927)

The communist government, which came to power in October 1917, intended to become

“the sole provider for the cultural needs of its citizens.” (Bystrianskii 2). On October 30, only five days after the revolution, the new government took formal ownership of the Winter Palace and the adjacent Imperial Hermitage, declaring them the State Hermitage Museum

(“Announcement”). The museum, however, was not capable of providing for the cultural needs of the citizens, because of serious economic and logistical problems. Its buildings were not heated; there was no financing to pay the staff or buy paper for publications; and its galleries stood empty, as key collections had been evacuated to Moscow earlier. Attendance dipped from

180,000 in 1914 to about 11,000 in 1919 (Piotrovskii, Ermitazh 69, 72). The old Imperial

Hermitage staff, who stayed with the museum, boycotted “the coup,” and while they opened 13

written orders from the new government, they “did nothing about them” (V. Suslov 52). Despite this, the government let the hostile staff continue in their roles, because there was no one to replace them (Kachalina 89-148). Kniga and revolutsiia (The Book and the Revolution), a government periodical dedicated to cultural policy, explained: the government had to tolerate noncommunist scholars, because communists were not yet as rich in their own resources

(Bystrianskii 4).

The lack of scholarly resources, however, was not the only reason. Other pressing issues required the government’s attention at the time. The new state had to fight Russian royalists and their international supporters in a bitter civil war, suppress revolts by farmers, and fight nationalist movements in Central Asia and the Caucasus. The government’s policy swung from extreme economic repression (“the Red Terror”) to relative freedom of private economic initiative (“the New Economic Policy”). Through all this, the Hermitage continued to operate.

There were exhibitions of Ancient Egyptian cults (1919), porcelain (1921), decorative silver

(1922), hand fans (1923), and medieval armor (1923); there were also new departments of the

Muslim Middle East (1920) and Public Tours (1925). Beginning in 1918, Hermitage staff was officially responsible for assisting new semiliterate and undereducated visitors understand the artifacts in their departments. Moreover, around the same time, the Hermitage developed a training program for schoolteachers conducting tours at the Hermitage and another program for schoolchildren to learn about Classical to Renaissance art with Hermitage staff (V. Suslov 339).

This was one of the first, if not the first, youth programs in the world at a major art museum.

These educational programs sent implicit messages of welcome, encouragement, and hope for a better life to new museum visitors. At the same time, they were devoid of any political content, as they were implemented by the old staff, who ran the museum in difficult times as they deemed 14

best. From the political point of view, the government’s initial efforts to take over the Hermitage were more formal than effective. Characteristically, throughout the 1920s, the Hermitage operated without its own local communist party organization, which was customarily placed in leading government institutions to oversee political compliance (56).

Writing Style and Treatment of Religious Subjects

Written by the old staff, the Hermitage publications of the 1920s continued the traditions of the

Imperial Hermitage discussed earlier. The first issue of the Collected Works (1920) was dedicated to staff member Iakov Smirnov, who had died of malnutrition in 1918 (Sbornik 1), and in 1923, Oscar Valdgauer dedicated his Roman Portrait Sculpture to his college professor Artur

Brock (Rimskaia 3). Valdgauer’s texts were devoid of any revolutionary rhetoric. Instead, they were permeated with old-fashioned romanticism and a European perspective, as the author pondered over World War I, which had devastated Europe not so long ago:

A new world is born . . . still unknown, still enveloped in a thick fog. We cannot know

what form this new European culture will take; we cannot even know if there will be a

new European culture after the horrors Europe has lived through. (7)

Valdgauer “yearned for the unattainable ideal of beauty” recalling German Romantic poets

Platen and Hölderlin, the Pre–Raphaelites, and the Impressionists, and invoked the cultural symbols of his past, for example, comparing a sculptural portrait of a Roman woman to portrait of Ida Rubinstein painted by Valentin Serov in 1910, a bourgeois ballet dancer living in Paris, and a bourgeois artist, which was inappropriate from the revolution’s point of view (56, 58, 70).

The treatment of religious subjects in Hermitage publications did not change, despite the official separation of church and state in 1918, the government’s antireligious campaigns, and 15

the new lowercase spelling of religious terms in the official press (Otchet 49-53; Koms. Paskha;

Koms. Rozhdestvo). Valdgauer capitalized “B.C.” (before Christ) in his books, although this notation directly referenced Christ (Putevoditel’ 14, 16-17); biblical terms like Crucifixion and

Holy Family were still capitalized (Kube 10-11, 13, 27); the staff continued to use the traditional

Russian Orthodox Bogoroditsa instead of Madonna (Pervaia 4, 6, 13), and some paintings and artists were listed in Italian, such as Duccio di Buoninsegna, Maesta, or Agnolo Gaddi. (Benois,

Katalog 11, 15, 19-20). No terminology explanations or references to the sources, such as Greek mythology or the Bible, were provided. The staff continued to write for its regular public, the educated middle class, which felt at ease with art and foreign languages, but needed guidance around the rearranged galleries and the new expropriated art that had been incorporated into the museum’s collections.

Introductions

At the same time, there were apparent changes. Introductions became shorter and drier, and instead of explaining the goals of the publications to the reader, they discussed the museum’s problems with the government. One such problem was expropriated cultural property, which flooded the Hermitage after the revolution. Depending on the author’s temperament, the introductions fluctuated from the apologetic to the annoyed. In the one-page introduction to his

1921 Putevoditel’ (Guidebook), Alfred Kube mentioned, without much comment, the “transfer” of private collections to the Hermitage in recent years (i-ii). Alexandre Benois’ 1922 Katalog started with a complaint about the expropriated art and a demand to solve the problem:

Many artifacts came to the Hermitage during the revolution, and we find it quite difficult

to accommodate them all here for technical reasons, primarily, lack of space. Only if the 16

adjacent Winter Palace comes under the management of the Hermitage . . . can the

complex task of rearranging [the art] be accomplished. Without it, accommodating the

new acquisitions appears to be an unreachable goal. (5)

The introduction to the catalog of the First State Hermitage Exhibition (1919) informed readers that the museum “ventured” into this event, because “everything that was best at the

Hermitage was evacuated to Moscow” (Pervaia 3). Oscar Valdgauer, also in the introduction, noted the lack of technical resources, the need to use volunteers due to inability to pay professional personnel, and the interference of outsiders in departmental plans. He concluded, rather grudgingly: “All that is left for us is to believe that our conscience is clear and that we did everything we could considering the circumstances.” (Putevoditel’ 8-9). Notably, Benois, Kube,

Valdgauer, Troinitskii, and other “bourgeois” staff, who respected private property, carefully avoided the words nationalized and expropriated and used new acquisitions, entered the museum, transferred, or accepted for storage instead. This apologetic “bourgeois” attitude towards the revolutionary expropriations would change soon.

Ignoring Politics

Politically, the publications of this period showed a dangerous disregard for reality. The catalog for The First Hermitage Exhibition (1920) enthusiastically informed the reader that the exhibition was located in the rooms “once beautifully furnished for the crown prince Nicholas,” the uncle of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, who was executed by the revolutionary government less than two years before. The brochure then explained that the Soviet Staircase leading to the exhibition had nothing to do with the new Soviet government, but was named after

Imperial Russia’s State Soviet, the advisory council to the tsar. For every work of art, the 17

brochure indicated its original owner, thus reminding the visitor of the forced divestitures by the new government. Finally, the Great October Socialist Revolution was recklessly called “the coup” (Pervaia 3).

The 1927 overview of the Hermitage by Alexander Suslov was published on the 10th anniversary of the revolution, yet in discussing the recent changes, the author never mentioned the Soviet government and spoke of the revolution only once, hardly positively and avoiding the very word revolution: “The proximity of the Hermitage to the Winter Palace—the last citadel of the Provisional Government—posed a serious threat in the October days for both its buildings and its collections, but, luckily, the Hermitage suffered no damage” (54-58). The opening page inappropriately referenced the former Ministry of Imperial Courts (5). The most “revolutionary” statement was that the new environment (but not the government) “created new goals for the

Hermitage,” that is, since 1918, the Hermitage was “not only a museum, but also a research and educational institution” (55).

A symbolic end-of-the-period document was the new 1927 Plan Gosudarstvennogo

Ermitazha (Floorplan of the State Hermitage) published under Oskar Valdgauer, the last

Hermitage director, whose career began in the Imperial Hermitage. The Plan had no introduction, as if the director had nothing left to say to either the government or the readers. It was a simple list of galleries with their traditional and, where applicable, alternative (“formerly known as”) names: the Jordan Staircase, named so for Jesus’ baptism in the river Jordan,

St. George’s Hall, formerly The Throne Room, Large Field Marshals’ Hall, Petrovskii Hall, formerly The Small Throne Room (12), Armorial Hall, referring to the Imperial Russian coat of arms, Alexander’s Hall, commemorating tsar Alexander I (13), and Nicholas’ Hall, commemorating tsar Nicholas I (map insert). Just like the last director with an Imperial 18

Hermitage past, tsars and symbols of monarchy were out of place in a Soviet museum and would be replaced very soon.

Summary

The implicit messages in the Hermitage’s publications tell a story of intellectuals who did not accept the revolution, their feelings, actions, dedication, and the difficult times their museum went through. These messages derive from the careful choice of words when speaking about the things they disagreed with, the avoidance of any mention of the revolution or the new government, the use of traditional painting names and museum toponymy, dedications and acknowledgements, old capitalization rules and dating systems, individual writing styles, and the language of the educated middle class devoid of new political rhetoric, terminology, or acronyms. This disregard for the revolution in museum publications could not last long. The government wanted to demonstrate its successes, whether real or imaginary, in industry, agriculture, and culture. In the late 1920s, the situation at the Hermitage changed, affecting both its staff and its communications.

The Museum as a Factory of Political Education: Communications in Stalin’s

Time (1928–1955)

By the late 1920s, the Soviet government had stabilized politically and economically in all its territories. In 1928, the head of state Joseph Stalin embarked on a new program of stricter government control in industry, agriculture, and culture to expedite the building of socialism.

The same year, the Central Administration for Science, Art, and Museums (Glavnauka) audited the Hermitage’s ten-year report, noting the need for “a new illustrated guidebook, in which art 19

schools and each particular artist” would be discussed from the Marxist point of view (Yefimova

113). The First Conference of Museum Tour Guides demanded that museum exhibitions

“provide the basis for propaganda work” (Lopatkina 186). Finally, the First All–Russia Museums

Congress, which convened in December 1930, declared that museums, as an industry, were

“significantly lagging behind in building socialism” and needed “a major reconstruction to become factories of political education.” The reconstruction implied replacing the old bourgeois personnel with new working class staff and basing museum expositions on Marx’s theory of conflict of social groups, such as farmers against landlords or workers against factory owners

(Dmitrienko and Lozovaia 194, 197). In response, the new Hermitage director Boris Legran, in his programmatic brochure The Socialist Reconstruction of the Hermitage, laid out the new priorities for the Museum based on the Congress’ guidelines. This small brochure marked a new era in the history of Hermitage communications in terms of its goals, content, and style.

Replacing the Staff

The brochure reported that as part of its restructuring, the Hermitage brought in “new staff

(Marxist historians and art critics) to help reshape the ideology of the old staff” (Legran 33).

Indeed, an analysis of the Hermitage’s employment records shows that by the mid–1930s, the heads of all the main departments and many lead researchers, who had started their careers at the museum before the revolution, were fired from their jobs (Kachalina et al.). To replace this significant loss of staff, the museum brought in outside consultants from the local Communist

Academy and the Institute of Red Professors, and hired recent university graduates and even college students, who had not yet completed their studies (Legran 32; Piotrovskii, Istoriia 82).

Compared to the old staff, the newcomers lacked education and experience, but brought the right 20

political views. For example, unlike previous authors, they were not bashful about the expropriation of private collections: “the museum was greatly enriched by the nationalization of the tsar’s and private collections” (Kratkii spravochnik 5 [1932]). Statements like these assured the new revolutionary visitors that the mass robbing of “the rich,” in which most of them or members of their families participated, was the right thing to do. Sometimes the nationalization was rationalized as necessary to protect the art, as in the album by Levinson-Lessing, who claimed that the government “collected the art recklessly abandoned by owners of aristocratic mansions and rich bourgeois apartments, when they ran away overseas” (4). These new staff members redefined the Hermitage’s public communications.

Incorporating Marxist Social Theory

Following the directions of the First Museum Congress, director Legran tasked the Hermitage with demonstrating to its visitors “the social nature of art . . . and its role in the conflict of social groups” (14). The conflict of social groups is the core of Marx’s social theory, which proclaimed the inevitable transition of slave–owing societies to feudalism, then to capitalism, and, finally, to socialism as the ultimate goal of history. This theory became “the basis for the new organizational structure of the Hermitage,” where “all museum artifacts were to be researched and exhibited based on this theory” (35). Accordingly, the Museum was divided into four new departments: Pre–Class Societies, Antiquity, Feudal Near East, and Feudal and Capitalist Europe

(Kratkii spravochnik 3 [1932]). Galleries acquired long descriptive names using Marxist terminology. For example, the French art was exhibited in the following successive halls: Art during the Struggle between the Absolute Monarchy and Feudal Landlords, Art during the Reign of the Absolute Monarchy, Art during the Decay of the Absolute Monarchy and the Preparation 21

for Bourgeois Revolution, Art of the Bourgeoisie Shortly before the Revolution, and, finally, Art of the Great French Revolution (3540). There was no longer Italian or French furniture, but

“Furniture Serving Feudal Lords and City Elites in Catholic Countries,” “Furniture Serving

Burghers and Nobility in Protestant Countries,” or “Russian Furniture Serving Landlords and

Serf Owners” (Kratkii spravochnik 73, 75 [1933]). Thus, when using the floorplans to chart their way through the French art, visitors formed the Marxist view on history as a battlefield of the oppressors and the oppressed and a steady movement from one “decaying” social order to the next. They also learned to associate works of art with the social group, the interests of which the piece was “serving,” rather than with the artist, country, or time when the piece was made. This provoked anger towards the “sybarite” social groups that usurped art made by working men, but also brought satisfaction, because art was taken away from these social groups to serve Soviet people.

In 1934, the departments were renamed again, so that the visitors could better relate the art of the past with their own experience. Feudal Near East became Near East from Ancient

Cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia to the Era of Imperialism, while Feudal and Capitalist

Europe became Western Europe from Feudalism to the Era of Proletariat Revolutions (Kratkii spravochnik 3 [1934]). Both imperialism and proletariat revolution were terms familiar to the visitors, who, personally or through their families, had been involved in the revolution against imperialism not so long ago. Gallery names acquired a social modifier, as in Art of Sienna’s

Feudal Lords, Art of Sienna’s Bourgeois, or Art of the Upper Bourgeoisie of Florence (formerly the Hall of Leonardo da Vinci) (17-18). This classification implicitly taught museum visitors that

Leonardo served the upper, while Simone Martini served the middle bourgeoisie in their respective cities. 22

To demonstrate “the social nature of art,” the 1934 Kratkii spravochnik added historical overviews for each department, which explained how art was produced by social struggle. The visitor learned that “the fierce struggle of classes in the emerging [Greek] society of slave owners produced a complex picture of struggling art movements” (7) and “the disintegration of feudal societies escalated the conflict between classes and led to a fierce struggle between the old class of landlords and the new class of bourgeoisie” and that this struggle “raised [Italian] art to unprecedented heights” (16). In reference books, which provided limited information about the artifacts, historical overviews were often the only information museum visitors learned.

Sometimes attempts to incorporate Marxism into every sentence produced heavy-handed statements like “the abstract geometric style [of Greek vases] expressed the ideology of [Greek] nobility” or “the esthetics [of Athenian art] strived to . . . cultivate a feeling of superiority over slaves” (7, 8). However blunt, the government’s goals were met: visitors left the Hermitage’s new expositions with the idea that art was the product of social struggle and artists should be judged by the social groups they served.

Exhibitions of “lace and mirrors, snuffboxes and gemstone rings,” which represented the interests of the 1920s “bourgeois art historians” who “refused to accept . . . the priorities of a

Soviet museum” (Varshavskii and Rest, Ermitazh 223), gave way to exhibitions of Revolutionary

Dutch Artists, Artists of the John Reed Club (Lopatkina 188), French Music at the Time of Feudal

Disintegration and Bourgeois Revolution (Ginsburg), The Imperial Hermitage during Capitalist

Prosperity and the Disintegration of Tsarism, Religion as a Weapon in the Conflict of Social

Groups, Victorious Atheism, and several other antireligious exhibitions (Plan 23, 25 [1930]).

23

Developing a New Language

While the content of the new Hermitage communications was shaped by the government’s political goals, their language was shaped by the ability of the visitors to understand what the

Museum sought to teach them. In the 1930s, this ability was still limited by the low educational and literacy levels.

From the very first days, the new regime had an army of competent cicerones at its

disposal, who were ready to help workers, [revolutionary] sailors, and Red Army soldiers

learn about world art. This was, however, insufficient, as the cicerones could not speak

the language of their audience. At the same time, the audience did not know any of the

words one needs to know when visiting a museum.” (Schmidt 197)

To accommodate the visitors, the language of communications became simpler, shorter, and free of professional and foreign terms. The introductions were cut in half and the sentences acquired an authoritative tone, which would become a standard for the museum’s popular literature until the early 1960s. To understand the immense changes in the language, compare the opening of the 1930 Plan published before the First Museum Congress and the 1932 Kratkii spravochnik published after:

Prior to using this Plan, please read the visitor’s itinerary offered below, as the many

centuries of cultural artifacts created by mankind and located on the three floors of the

vast buildings of the Hermitage, the Old Hermitage, and the former Winter Palace, do not

allow the first-time visitor to find his way around on his own. Inevitably, such visitor

would ask himself: what should I see, how should I do it, and where do I begin? The

following text provides some brief answers to these questions. (3)

24

The 1932 edition reduced this old-fashioned verbosity to a brief command: “Prior to exploring an enormous museum like the Hermitage, you should learn about how the art is organized here and thus understand your visit’s itinerary” (3).

Descriptions were reduced to politically calibrated statements stripped of individuality, as the anonymous authors seemed to avoid any personal judgments, which could be wrongly interpreted and get them in trouble.

At the same time, there were publications by a few of the staff who survived the purges of the early 1930s and continued to write in the sophisticated language of the 1920s, primarily in smaller specialized brochures. These publications did not mention the class struggle, Marxist theories, any communist authorities, or marker words, but observed new decapitalization rules, as in Death of the madonna (Kamenskaia 25). Examples include Fanagoriiskie figurnye vazy

(Phanagoria’s Figure Vessels) by Anna Peredolskaia, a student of Valdgauer (1937); Akvarel’

XVI−XIX vekov (Watercolors of the 16th–19th centuries) by Tatiana Kamenskaia (1937); Oforty

Edgara Shaina (Etchings of Edgar Chaine) by Elizaveta Nenarokova (1940), and others. It is quite remarkable that these two types of publications could exist at the same time. Some authors wrote in both styles, possibly forced to do so by the circumstances. For example, in Rembrandt,

Dobroklonskii quoted Marx and talked about Rembrandt in economic and social terms (4-5, 7

[1937]), while in Rubens (1940) there were no references to communist authorities or any political terminology. Other authors tried to combine very complex cultural concepts with political ideas, producing barely comprehensible textual hybrids:

As directed by the Hermitage, the author [of this brochure] intends to apply the concept

of artistic synthesis to different manifestations of art and to look at different art forms as

functionally related parts of a single frontline of the social struggle. The Hermitage, for 25

the first time in the history of museums, has attempted to supplement the silent language

of spatial arts with the vocal language of music and literature to come closer to

demonstrating the essence of social class theory. (Ioffe 3)

In fact, the range of variation in the language and the level of sophistication in the

Hermitage’s publications of the 1930s is striking and unlike any other period, which indicates that the transition from the old to the new was not completed in the 1930s.

Authority Figures and Markers

A new feature of Hermitage publications were references to the founding fathers of communist ideology Marx and Engels, the founder of the Soviet Union Vladimir Lenin, and the current head of state Joseph Stalin. Their names were referenced in the beginning and then throughout the text of any popular guidebook, reminding the visitors that these political figures were the highest authorities in all spheres of life, including the arts. As the decades progressed, Stalin appeared more frequently and prominently than the other figures. In 1934, director Legran referred to

“Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin” (27), while Antonova’s 1948 guidebook opened with a quote from Stalin followed by Stalin’s close associate Andrei Zhdanov, and only then by Lenin and

Marx (Antonova et al., Populiarnyi 3-5, 20-21); in Levinson-Lessing’s 1952 guidebook, multiple quotes by Marx and Engels were preceded by a paragraph about “Stalin’s personal role” in the preservation of the Hermitage during World War II and his “genius theoretical work in linguistics, [which] set an example . . . for research, exhibition, and outreach efforts at the

Hermitage” (6, 7, 14, 25). Inevitably, the new authorities replaced the old: Alexander’s,

Nicholas’, and Field Marshals’ Halls, the Large and Small Throne Rooms, and Armorial Hall

26

lost their names and were listed simply as halls, while the Jordan Staircase was renamed Visitor

Tours Staircase (Kratkii spravochnik 23-24, [1930]).

In addition to the authority figures, marker words of two types, political and social, were used throughout Hermitage communications. Political marker words associated the Hermitage with important political symbols, such as the October Revolution, the Soviet Union (also, our

Motherland) and the Communist Party, as in “visitors to the Hermitage come from all over the

Soviet Union,” “the largest museum in the Soviet Union,” “the ancient times in the history of our

Motherland,” “the Greek cities on the territory of our Motherland” (Antonova et al., Populiarnyi

3-27); “the Communist Party took great care to preserve art for the new generations,” “interest in art greatly increased after a number of ideological decisions by the Communist Party,” etc.

(Gubchevskii, Kratkii 7-8 [1953]). Social markers shaped morals and attitudes and explained complex ideas in new terms. These included humanism interpreted as an interest in the common man; real (concrete) life interpreted as everyday material life, as opposed to the idealized or spiritual life; scientific approach, which was contrasted with a purely aesthetic approach; working people who were set against the ruling social groups; or mother’s love, which helped transform the paintings of Madonna and Child into genre scenes.

Treatment of Religious Subjects

Although the official government policy was atheism, a great majority of adult museum visitors of the 1930s had been baptized and raised in the Orthodox faith or other religions and had not fully abandoned their faith and religious traditions. Following the government’s antireligious policies, much effort was made to disassociate these visitors from the religious content of art and to belittle or masque it. Art was stripped of its religious content and presented to the visitors as 27

paintings of everyday life (genre art), and the key religious terms lost their uppercase, including holy family, madonna, mother of god, and so on (Kratkii spravochnik 24, 25 [1932]). The

Russian Orthodox names of Mother of God (Bogomater) and Bearer of God (Bogoroditsa) were replaced with Madonna and in some cases with Mary in all Hermitage paintings, except for those missed accidentally. The Italian Madonna emphasized the foreign origin of the artwork, which distanced the Orthodox viewers from it making sure they did not perceive the painting as a religious object. The same transformation happened with all paintings that had Baby Jesus or

Baby Savoir in their names. These were changed to a baby or a child, as in Madonna with a baby. Initially, this decapitalization was confusing, as in Adoration of a child, which acquired pagan overtones (23), or ambiguous as in The Youth of maiden Mary instead of The Youth of

Virgin Mary (25). Where possible, the name of Christ was removed from the paintings, such as truncating Lamentation of Christ to The Lamentation in numerous paintings (25); the term Savior was removed from all paintings without exception; and biblical terms changed to their secular equivalents, such as replacing Adoration of the Shepherds with Adoration of the Herdsmen, where the word shepherd (pastyr) was the same as in the Lord is my shepherd and thus directly referenced the Bible (24). However, a satisfactory solution could not always be found quickly.

For example, the old dating system of B.C. (“before Christ”) was used in its preferred version of

C.E. (“christian era”), which also referenced Christ, but as an adjective did not require capitalization (compare, for example, the Bible, but biblical.) In the following decade, it would be permanently changed to C.E., Common Era. A few paintings were overlooked, because of the sheer number of artworks that had to be renamed. For example, Rubens’ Adoration of the

Shepherds still used the word shepherds, while in other paintings on the same subject, it was changed to herdsmen (Kratkii spravochnik 37 [1934]]. 28

Some popular brochures were published in new editions to remove the last traces of religious references. Here is how Dobroklonskii described Holy Family by Rembrandt (see fig. 3) in 1926:

If not for the little angels hovering in the light, one might think that Rembrandt painted a

common family scene. The mystical feeling, however, is created not so much by the

angels as, importantly, by Rembrandt’s lighting technique . . . the triumphant

combination of red and gold on the baby’s crib. (Rembrandt 26)

In 1937, the “mystical feeling” created by the light and the angels was gone. The visitor learned that “in pictures like The Carpenter’s Family, Rembrandt provided a perfect example of a genre scene” (Rembrandt 31). In 1926, Dobroklonskii briefly mentioned that Holy Family was “also referred to as The Carpenter’s Family” (26), while in 1937, he referred to the same painting only as The Carpenter’s Family (31).

Fig. 3. Van Rijn, Rembrandt Harmenszoon. Holy Family. 1645, Hermitage Museum, St.

Petersburg, Russia. Wikimedia Commons, 2010, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:

Rembrandt_-_The_Holy_Family_with_Angels_-_WGA19128.jpg. Accessed 11 May 2019. 29

Educating the Visitor

For the political education to be effective, the undereducated and semiliterate museum visitors had to be closely supervised. In the 1930s, the Hermitage developed a diverse communications program catering to organized groups, which included tour series, tours for high school and college students, single tours for organizations and institutions, weekend gallery talks, visits by

Hermitage staff to factories, colleges, and institutions with lectures and presentations, traveling exhibitions of photos of Hermitage artifacts at local clubs and factory dorms, and regular painting, archeology, and art history groups for middle and high school students (Antonova et al.,

Populiarnyi 43-46).

At the same time, popular museum publications did not provide much help to less sophisticated visitors beyond the simplification of the language. Terminology and iconography were rarely explained. In a 55–page guidebook, Antonova explained only three terms: antiquities in the Department of Antiquities, loggias in the Raphael Loggias, and Madonna in Leonardo’s paintings (13, 18, 19). Notably, Madonna was defined as “mother of Christ, a character in

Christian legends, who was often featured in the artwork of the old masters” (18). The fact that

Antonova had to explain who Madonna was indicates that Madonna, who replaced the Orthodox

Bogoroditsa and Bogomater in the Hermitage painting, was apparently still confusing to museum visitors. The two-volume, 300-page General Guidebook edited by Orbeli had no explanation of art or historical terms.

In addition to the lack of explained terminology, popular museum publications had low circulation, from 3,000 to 5,000, comparable to the circulation in the 1920s, when the Hermitage was in a difficult economic situation. A reason for this curious fact, may be the relatively low number of educated and fully literate independent visitors, who needed guidebooks. Or, perhaps, 30

being a “factory of political education,” the Hermitage discouraged independent visitors who could rely exclusively on guidebooks, which is consistent with the museum’s extensive program for organized groups. Whatever the reason, the low circulation and the lack of explanatory comments in the Hermitage’s popular literature of the period are noteworthy.

Definition of the Museum Visitor

The definition of the visitor itself changed over the course of this long period from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. Immediately after the revolution, the Hermitage welcomed workers, revolutionary sailors, and soldiers, while the “bourgeois” professions, like doctors, engineers, or teachers, were never mentioned. By addressing visitors this way, the government showed its support for the social groups it deemed important for the revolution and enforced their entitlement to preferential treatment at the Hermitage. The government also understood that these social groups were not accustomed to museums and palaces and needed to feel welcomed there. Towards the late 1930s, once the former “bourgeois” professionals (including the

Hermitage staff) had been replaced or forced to change their political views, there was no need to alienate this group. In fact, it was important to show that these social groups had become an integral part of Soviet society. Now, the visitors were referred to as “mass visitor,” “people of different professions,” “the working people of our Motherland,” or “the Soviet people” (Kratkii spravochnik 5 [1932]; Antonova et al., Populiarnyi 4; Gubchevskii, Kratkii 7, 9 [1953]).

The geographic profile of the visitors also changed. The democratic nature of the museum was implicitly emphasized in every guidebook, as it hosted “guests from the remote corners of the Soviet Union” (Levinson-Lessing 5) and “from far and wide in the Soviet Union”

(Antonova et al., Populiarnyi 4). At the same time, while the country perceived itself in isolation 31

and surrounded by enemies, these guests, at least in theory, were exclusively nationals of the

Soviet Union. This changed after World War II, when communist regimes were established in

Eastern Europe. Now, the Hermitage’s definition of the visitor incorporated “foreign guests from people’s democracies,” referring to the new communist countries and countries like India, Iran, and China, whose friendship the Soviet Union was seeking (Levinson-Lessing 5). However, the definition of visitors still excluded the capitalist West. Thus, by defining those who were or were not welcome at the Hermitage, the museum implicitly shaped both the visitors’ social identity and their international outlook.

Summary

Spurred by the government’s political mandates, the 1930s brought sweeping changes to the

Hermitage. The new administration and staff replaced the old and brought with them the new ideology and the new language. They removed any traces of individuality from Hermitage publications, which henceforward addressed an impersonal generalized reader on behalf of an impersonal collective body of authors. Communications became politically charged and aggressively atheistic. Explicit and implicit messages in communications reinforced each other.

They promoted new political authorities, the Marxist approach to art, and the accomplishments of the revolution. Implicit messages reached the visitors through frequent quoting of political authorities, placing references to authorities in prominent places in the text, renaming galleries and artifacts, using the marker works, welcoming certain social groups, and stripping artwork of its religious content through capitalization and other means. Marxist ideology dominated the implicit messages in the Hermitage’s communications until the onset of World War II, when the museum’s focus shifted to protecting its collections. After the war, this policy continued through 32

Stalin’s death and two years of rule by a close associate of Stalin until 1955, when a new sharp political change occurred.

The Museum as a Place for Aesthetic Education: Communications during Khrushchev’s

Liberalization (1955–1964)

The next leader of the country, Nikita Khrushchev, publicly overturned Stalin’s policies in many areas. The late 1950s–1960s are remembered in Russian history as the time of hope, space exploration, and criticism of Stalin’s personality cult.

However, in the murky transitional period between Stalin’s death in 1953 and

Khrushchev’s first address in 1956 denouncing Stalin, the Hermitage continued to communicate with its visitors in the old way. The only change between the 1953 guidebook by Gubchevskii, published before Stalin’s death, and its second edition in 1956 published three years afterward, was the removal of all references to Stalin. Thus, “the geniuses, Lenin and Stalin, took great care to preserve the artistic heritage of the past” transformed to “the Communist Party and the Soviet government took great care to preserve the artistic heritage of the past,” and “guided by the great leaders of the Revolution, Lenin and Stalin, the revolutionary workers . . . took over the Winter

Palace” in 1953 became “the revolutionary workers . . . took over the Winter Palace” in 1956

(Kratkii 7, 14 [1953]; Kratkii 7, 12 [1956]).

This was not much more than a cosmetic change, an immediate reaction to the new anti- cult policy, the meaning and consequences of which were not yet clearly understood. In all other respects these two conservative editions continued Stalin’s traditions. They reaffirmed that the

Hermitage’s exhibits were based on Marx’s social theory, referred to the former residents of the

Winter Palace as “traitors and mortal enemies of the working people,” and reiterated the 33

museum’s goal to “foster communist ideology” in its visitors (Gubchevskii, Kratkii 7, 14 [1953];

7, 12 [1956]). The 1956 edition continued to remove Russian Orthodox names that were overlooked during the renaming campaign of the 1930s and to turn religious subjects into secular ones. The Russian Orthodox Bogomater in Anguish by Luis de Morales in the 1953 edition appeared as Madonna in Anguish in 1956 (57, 72) with both bogomater and madonna in lower case; The Childhood of Bogoroditsa by Francisco de Zurbarán became Mary in Her Youth, now presented to museum visitors as a portrait of a common girl named Mary (57, 73); and Repose of the Holy Family on their Way into Egypt by Esteban Murillo was named Repose on the Way into

Egypt, turning a biblical story into a genre picture of a family traveling to Egypt (58, 73).

In addition to the old discourse, these guidebooks continued to use the same terse, command language developed by the Museum in the 1930s for its undereducated visitors:

Dedicate each visit to the Hermitage to one group of artifacts. . . . The galleries are listed

in a sequence, which you should follow when learning about this exposition.

(Gubchevskii, Kratkii 19, 25 [1953])

Use the guidebook to determine the shortest route and proceed to the designated exhibit

hall. . . . Hold the floorplan correctly in front of you, in the direction of your movement.

This will prevent possible errors when using the floorplan. . . . When making turns and

also in the halls with several entrances, verify that you are moving in the right direction

through the exposition. (Gubchevskii, Kratkii 21-22 [1956])

The old rhetoric and language, however, were unsuitable for the new generation of museumgoers. Unlike the museum visitors of the 1930s and 1940s, many of whom were born and raised before the October Revolution, the 1960s generation came of age in the Soviet Union.

The majority were well educated, decisively atheistic, proud of their country’s technical and 34

social achievements, and increasingly independent in their thinking. This generation launched the first artificial Earth satellite in 1957 and the first man in space in 1961. The Hermitage needed a new language to communicate with these new museum visitors. In 1956 and 1961,

Khrushchev delivered his famous addresses, which completed the reversal of Stalin’s policies.

Once it became clear that the country would not turn back, the Hermitage quickly transformed itself from a “factory for political education” into an institution that strived to “serve the important goal of education and aesthetic development” and “educate and foster the aesthetic development of our people” (Persianova, Ermitazh 94; Piotrovskii, Ermitazh 18). This fundamental policy shift defined the language, content, interpretations, and other important features of Hermitage communications, which were largely maintained until the fall of the Soviet

Union and, to an extent, have carried over into the post–Soviet period.

Developing a New Language

The early 1960s experienced a burst of creativity in publication titles. Previously, the titles of popular museum publications tended to be matter-of-fact, as in The Hermitage: A Short

Guidebook, The Painting Gallery of the Hermitage, A Brief Reference Book to the Hermitage, or, simply, The Guidebook. In contrast, many titles of the 1960s were friendly and engaging, even enticing, which must have been quite striking to museum visitors at the time: In the World of

Treasures by Antonova et al. (1961), When and How the Hermitage Was Built by Antonova

(1965), Around the Hermitage without a Tour Guide by Shapiro (1965), and Travels into the

Past Around Hermitage Galleries (1959–1971), among others. An open declaration of the right to be free of the tour guide, an authority figure associated with government control in museums, was novel and exciting. 35

The new titles were matched by the new language, which lost its command quality and excessive political rhetoric. The new guidebooks initiated dialogs and offered alternatives. Here are user instructions from a 1965 guidebook, a stark contrast to the 1956 guidebook quoted above:

Depending on whether you have one, two, or three days to spend at the museum, you will

naturally have a different ability to see the collection. If you plan to visit the Hermitage

only once for two to three hours and use the recommended itinerary, you will cover only

the minimum of galleries and artifacts marked here with a circle. If you visit the museum

twice, you can explore more. Suggested galleries and artifacts are marked with squares.

Finally, if you plan to visit for three days, or perhaps spend more time during your two-

day visit, you can cover all the sections described in this guidebook. (Shapiro, Po

Ermitazhu 3 [1965])

This new friendly language was also a dual-purpose language, providing some information for the visitors and some for the government censors. It developed quickly as a response to the new requirements regarding religion and museums, which were quite contradictory and confusing. Boris Piotrovskii, who headed the Hermitage for almost 30 years, described these requirements as follows:

During the tours, the topic of “art and religion” comes up regularly and for different

reasons. . . . The tour guide or the lecturer must demonstrate his atheistic worldview in

the selection of artifacts for the tour and their interpretation. Preference should be given

to progressive artists. The realistic and democratic art should be set against the official

reactionary art, which supported the ruling elites. The tour guide has to be clear about the

position of the church and to expose its reactionary role and resistance to all that was new 36

and progressive. … At all times, the tour guide should be active in promoting atheism,

but this work requires delicacy and moderation. . . . It is important to show that great art

could be created in a church-dominated environment, but that the artists often went

against the church, even when commissioned by the church. Thus, many works of art,

including those on religious subjects, were profoundly humanistic. (Ermitazh 168-169)

“Actively promoting atheism” and doing it “with delicacy and in moderation” at the same time required much skill. During the 1960s, many of the Hermitage’s staff authors developed a language to communicate with their readers. This language allowed an extended discussion of such sensitive topics as religion, as long as certain rules were observed. Effectively, any

Hermitage artist could be included in a guidebook, tour, or Hermitage-sponsored radio talk, if the required marker words were used, even if they were meaningless in the artistic context or distorted the facts. Thus, it was important to note that an artist was progressive, which meant he had an antagonistic relationship with society or the church; that his art was realistic, or had none or few religious attributes; and that the artist was democratic or humanistic, that is, focused on common people. Many artists naturally fit these requirements, like Michelangelo who had confrontations with the pope or Rembrandt who lost popularity in Dutch society towards the end of his artistic life. Artists who did not fit well, like Fragonard or Watteau with their art for the

French aristocracy, could be used as examples of masterful, yet reactionary art, to show the distinction from progressive art. The statement that “15th-century Florence had the most progressive art school in Italy, consciously and deliberately expanding realism in art” (Berezina and Lifshitz 38) opened the door to virtually any 15th century Florentine artist favored by the guidebook author.

37

Any artist mentioned by official authority figures was automatically deemed progressive.

Thus, a quote by Marx, “Rembrandt painted the mother of God as a Dutch country girl,” was regularly included in Hermitage publications to reinforce Rembrandt’s legitimacy (Persianova,

Sokrovishchnitsa 116). We do not know if Rembrandt did or did not really use a country girl as his model, but no factual proof was required. Simply using the markers in the right places was sufficient. Examples were plentiful across the publications, as the tour guide requirements were applied consistently: “Titian’s Mary Magdalene is an embodiment of humanism . . . painted materially, realistically”; “Caravaggio was fascinated by simple, non-glamorous life”; “the fainting old mother [Madonna] is dressed like a simple Dutch farm woman” (Berezina and

Lifshitz 71, 88, 218); “by painting a simple, commoner girl as a dreamer, Caravaggio affronted

Italian academism”; “in his Descent from the Cross, Rembrandt’s focused on simple, common people” (Persianova, Sokrovishchnitsa 103, 116); Leonardo’s Madonna Benois “embodied a humanistic idea of maternal love,” etc. (Shapiro, Po Ermitazhu 42 [1965])

In addition to the required marker words, Hermitage authors developed language constructs, which helped bypass the censor. One of the favorites was “despite a [religious symbol], this image is ultimately nonreligious” and its variations. For example, “only the halos remind us that this is a religious painting” (Dmitrieva 15); “only the angel with a censer soaring in the clouds reminds us that this is a religious scene,” “if not for the lion, a traditional companion of St. Jerome, we might think Dürer painted his contemporary, a scientist and humanist” (Arane 23, 28); “except of the long wings behind his shoulders, the angel looks definitively human”; and, ultimately, “in essence, nothing in this picture reminds us of Mary and baby Jesus” (Shapiro, Po Ermitazhu 42 [1965]).

38

Hermitage visitors skillfully mined these constructs for useful information. Consider this statement about The Benois Madonna by Leonardo da Vinci: “If not for the halos (which, incidentally, were painted later by another artist, not Leonard), we would never guess that this mother and child were saints”. Here, a visitor unfamiliar with basic religious iconography learned that saints in art were recognized by something called a halo. At the same time, the censor was appeased, because “another artist,” not Leonardo, painted the halos. In another example, Holy Family by Rembrandt, where “only the angels remind us that these are images of

Mary, baby Jesus, and St. Joseph,” the visitor learned that the Holy Family included Mary, Jesus, and St. Joseph, while the censor was happy, because this story was treated as a genre scene by

Rembrandt, except for the angels (Shapiro, Po Ermitazhu 28, 73 [1965]). Note the resurrected

“St.” in front of Joseph’s name, which had been absent until now (Lessing, Gosudarstvennyi

Ermitazh 9 [1952]; Persianova, Sokrovishchnitsa 94). To understand how much had changed in the 1960s, one should recall that in 1937, this painting was renamed The Carpenter’s Family and anything that could relate it to the Bible was carefully removed from the description. It was a

“genre scene” depicting “quiet family happiness” without naming a single member of the family

(Dobroklonskii, Rembrandt 31 [1937]).

Often, a way to get to the true information was to reverse the meaning of a statement. For example, “the Christian legend [about Mary Magdalene] was not Titian’s focus in this painting”

(Persianova, Ermitazh 59) was read as “Titian focused on the Christian legend in this painting”;

“Caravaggio was fascinated by simple, unglamorous life” meant that Caravaggio indulged in luxury; “Perugino did not tell the story of St. Sebastian’s martyrdom” hinted that Perugino wanted to tell the story of St. Sebastian’s martyrdom; and “nothing in this picture reminds us of

Mary and baby Jesus” encouraged the reader to look for clues pointing to Mary and baby Jesus. 39

At the same time, while Soviet museum visitors understood the duality of this language, it shaped their worldview in a powerful way. This was done through multiple repetitions of the same interpretations, marker words, and language constructs in all Hermitage communications, and, importantly, through the authority of great art. Following their favorite artists, museum visitors sympathized with simple people, admired humanism, and resented reactionary society and the church, which rejected the artist, according to the official version of the events presented by the staff of the largest and most authoritative museum in the country.

Authority Figures and Markers

In addition to the complete removal of Stalin’s name from all museum communications, the new policy of Liberalization resulted in greatly reduced references to Marx, Engels, and Lenin. These authority figures were moved out of the opening paragraphs of publications, while the emphasis shifted to the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, and progressive and democratic figures of

19th century Russian culture. Thus, a quote on Rembrandt by the literary critic Stasov appeared before the quote by Marx in Gubchevskii’s guidebook (Po zalam 31), and in his album, Marx appeared only once, and after Russian 19th century writers and artists (Zhivopis’ 3); instead of the communist authorities, Persianova cited the 19th-century poet Pushkin, the composer

Tchaikovsky, and the writer Tolstoi (Ermitazh 8-9). The authority preferences of museum visitors naturally followed the Hermitage’s lead.

Educating the Visitor

The task of fostering aesthetic development required, among other things, familiarity with art terminology and the subjects of Hermitage artworks. Although fully literate and educated in 40

sciences, the visitors of the 1960s lacked knowledge of ancient and foreign languages, classical mythology, and the Bible. As mentioned before, these subjects formed the foundation of the secondary education before the revolution, but were removed from the school program by the

Soviet government. By the 1960s, the Hermitage was ready to welcome this new type of visitors on a large scale. The circulation of popular museum publications increased manifold, from an average of 3,000 to 5,000 copies to over 100,000. Importantly, these new publications strived to explain nearly every historical or art term that might cause difficulty for the average museumgoer. A 400-page guidebook on European art by Berezina and Lifshitz came out in

15,000 copies with extensive commentaries on terminology. Terms like humanism, asceticism, frescos, tempera, easel painting, and diptych were explained in the text, and in addition, footnotes contained comments like “fra, in Fra Angelico, means brother, which was a way monks commonly addressed each other” or “canvas came into use only in the late 15th century”

(25-31). Some comments addressed obvious newcomers, such as “a question mark after the artist’s name means that his authorship is not confirmed” (49). Soon, glossaries were added to popular museum literature, such as “A Glossary of Architectural Terms” in a guidebook on

Hermitage architecture (Voronikhina 117) or a glossary of geographic terms, explaining such terms as Cana of the Galilee, Jericho, and Attica (Buslovich, Mifologicheskie 274 [1966]).

Finally, a publication entirely dedicated to iconography, Mythological, Literary, and

Historical Subjects in Painting, Sculpture, and Tapestries of the Hermitage Museum, came out in

1966: “Millions of visitors come to the museum, asking: what did the artist paint here? . . . The goal of this book is . . . to respond to this very question” (Buslovich et al. 11). Like other

Hermitage publications, his book worked hard to achieve a balance between the biblical information and the antireligious education required by the government. In this book, Hermitage 41

art was organized by story. For example, all paintings featuring Perseus and Andromeda or the

Return of the Prodigal Son were grouped together, and each group was labeled an antiquity myth, a biblical myth, or a Christian legend. To appease the censors, occasional stories opened with a brief antireligious statement or contained a belittling term, as in “Jesus Christ, the mythical founder of Christianity” (Cima de Conegliano’s Annunciation), “a series of miracles allegedly performed by Christ” (Garofalo, Marriage at Cana), “the admirers of Christ took his body off the cross” (Rembrandt, Descent from the Cross), or “the apostles Peter and Paul are mythological characters” (El Greco, Apostles Peter and Paul) (56, 59, 224, 37).

While denouncing Stalin’s personality cult, Khrushchev continued Stalin’s policy of antisemitism. This policy was instituted in the early 1950s, when the new state of Israel shifted its focus from the Soviet Union to the United States. The Suez Canal crisis of 1956 heightened tensions between Israel and the Soviet Union. In art, this tension manifested itself in the quiet elimination of all cultural and historic references to the Jews, which were abundant before the revolution, as well as in the 1920s and 1930s. Hermitage publications began to carefully avoid the words Hebrew, Israelites, Jews, and Jewish. Giorgione’s Judith was described as a young woman “who saved her people” or “risked her life to save her fellow countrymen,” without ever mentioning who those people were (Dmitrieva 26; Shapiro, Po Ermitazhu 48 [1965]). Shapiro went as far as call Judith, a character in the Old Testament, a Christian: “The Renaissance artists often turned to heroic characters from Christian mythology. Judith was one such biblical characters” (48). In Buslovich et al., the safer archaic word Hebrew briefly appeared as “Judith, a young Hebrew widow,” and “[Assyrian] troops besieging a Hebrew fortress” only to be changed in the next edition to “a young widow” and “a fortress, where her people were hiding”

(Mifologicheskie 262 [1966]; 261 [1972]). 42

Despite any shortcomings, Hermitage publications enjoyed widespread popularity, as they became a major source of biblical information in a country where the Bible was banned from public spaces and was dangerous to have at home. In fact, these publications were the only source of systematic and mass-produced biblical information. Although biblical information was also available through literature and popular science books like Joseph and His Brothers by

Thomas Mann or The Bible Stories by Zenon Kosidowski, these books fictionalized the Bible or presented it in a scientific context and were difficult to obtain. Hermitage publications, on the other hand, were mass-produced, nonfictional, annotated, and visually enhanced by the works of great artists. Special editions for high school students were equally popular with adults, because these editions often provided more biblical information, assuming that schoolchildren were less informed.

Hermitage communications became the ground on which the government’s antireligious policies and the public’s desire to know created an interesting interplay. Here, the implicit atheistic messages from the government were supplemented by implicit messages from

Hermitage authors, who readily shared with their readers the religious information that was banned not so long ago. Just like the rest of the Russian creative class (intelligentsia), Hermitage authors of the 1960s assumed, to varying degrees, the role of educators who were not in the opposition to the government yet, but enthusiastically embraced the new freedoms. Hermitage communication reflected these new attitudes.

Definition of the Museum Visitor Finalized

The geographic profile of the museum visitor was finalized during this time. The Soviet Union officially opened up for international cooperation with the capitalist countries of the West. In 43

1954, the Soviet Union joined UNESCO; in 1957, it established the Committee for Cultural Ties with Foreign Countries and joined the International Council of Museums (ICOM); and in 1958, it hosted the International Tchaikovsky Competition, which awarded the first prize to an

American pianist Van Cliburn. The Hermitage followed the new official policy by welcoming all visitors regardless of their country of origin: “delegations and tourists from all over the world, including Indonesia and Ireland, Canada and Vietnam, Sweden and Ghana,” “tourists from the countries of the West and the East,” (Persianova, Ermitazh 93 [1960], Sokrovishchnitsa 145);

“the Soviet people and visitors from overseas come [to the Hermitage] to see its amazing masterpieces” (Shapiro Po Ermitazhu 5 [1965]); “the mission of the Hermitage is . . . to strengthen cultural ties between countries all around the world” (Persianova, Sokrovishchnitsa

149), etc.

The opening of the Soviet Union, and the Hermitage, in particular, to Western tourists had an unexpected effect on a Hermitage favorite, Caravaggio’s The Lute Player (see fig. 4).

This painting was listed as The Mandolinist in pre–1917 publications, including by Somov (who also commented that it was a portrait of “a young man with feminine features” (18)) (1899),

Neustroev (1898), Liphart (1912), Konradi (1917), and the Catalog of Paintings of the Imperial

Hermitage (Kratkii katalog) (1900). Von Koene listed this piece as Portrait of a Young Man

Singing and Playing a Mandolin (1888). In the 1920s, there appeared to be no new Hermitage catalogs of European paintings, for the logistical and economic reasons discussed earlier. The

1920s staff, however, continued to follow Imperial Hermitage conventions, including traditional painting names, and it can be assumed that the name of this painting did not change. Also, a

German catalog by P. von Weiner published in 1923 listed Caravaggio’s work as Der

Mandolinenspieler, or male Mandolin Player, which supports this assumption (59). Yet in 1932 44

and 1934, Kratkii spravochnik (Reference Book) listed this painting as Mandolinistka, or female mandolin player (24). From then on, the painting continued under this name in all communications, including the 1940 two-volume General Guidebook edited by director Orbeli

(32); Gubchevskii, where it appeared under A Girl with a Lute (Kratkii 55 [1953]; Ermitazh 9

[1960]); Berezina and Lifshitz (89); and Persianova (Ermitazh 60 [1960]). In the two latter guidebooks, the painting was listed as Lutnistka, or female lute player. (Mandolin is a subgroup of the lute family, and the identification of the instrument was adjusted to be less specific.)

Fig. 4. Da Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi. The Lute Player. 1600, Hermitage Museum,

St. Petersburg, Russia. Wikimedia Commons, 2011, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:

The_Lute_Player-Caravaggio_(Hermitage).jpg. Accessed 11 May 2019.

What were the reasons for these changes? Throughout the 1920s, homosexuality was treated as a bourgeois prejudice and was not persecuted by law. In a 1926 satire from a Soviet prison gazette, homosexuality is described as “recreational activities of bourgeois prisoners from the former beau monde” (Emelianov). By the late 1920s, this attitude changed, in part, because

45

Stalin’s Soviet Union established itself as a state in which all ‘bourgeois prejudices’ were eliminated, but also for other reasons that are complex and lie outside the scope of this paper.

Importantly, in this environment, even a hint of homosexuality in popular Hermitage art could not be tolerated, and in the new 1932 Kraitkii spravochnik the male lute player became female.

In 1933, homosexuality became a criminal offense, and the girl continued to play the lute for another 30 years, through Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s removal from his post in 1964. By this time, the word homosexuality had been banned from all public discourse for decades, and

Soviet youth never heard of it, in any context, including negative. It could be argued that this, coupled with thousands of new Western tourists visiting the Hermitage, prompted the government go back to the original name of Caravaggio’s masterpiece. In 1964, the painting appeared as Young Man with a Lute in Italian Paintings of the 13th to 18th centuries at the

Hermitage (Vsevolozhskaia et al. 257-258). Since then, throughout the 1970s, The Lutenist, or male lute player, was used in all Hermitage communications, including in the set of Hermitage postage stamps issued in two million copies in 1966.

Summary

The Liberalization of the 1960s brought with it entirely new implicit messages in Hermitage communications. These messages encouraged learning and independent thinking, and formed a new image of the Hermitage as a welcoming and friendly place open to everyone. They were delivered to Hermitage visitors in lively book titles, friendly language, shifted authority figures, publications for schoolchildren, and information on religion not available before.

At the same time, a unique new phenomenon emerged in this decade. Whereas in Stalin’s time, the implicit and explicit messages in Hermitage communications reinforced each other, 46

reflecting the unity of official policy and public consciousness, the situation changed in the

1960s. Explicit and implicit messages began to stand in opposition, indicating a split in government-public unity. Hermitage publications developed several layers of information: an official educational layer, which delivered basic mythological and biblical facts to an average visitor; a hidden layer for a more sophisticated visitor, which required manipulating the information, such as the reversal of meaning or deciphering special language constructs; and information for the censor. Although Hermitage visitors quickly learned to deal with this duality, the doublespeak began to slowly corrupt the hopes and enthusiasm of the 1960s generation of museumgoers, reaching its peak in the next historical period.

Professionalization of the Museum: Communications during Stagnation (1964–1980)

The liberalization of the 1960s was memorable, but brief. Nikita Khrushchev was removed from his post in 1964, and his policies were declared “voluntarist,” which meant the political changes had gone too far too fast. By the late 1960s, the Era of Liberalization gave way to the Era of

Stagnation, a time of government confidence in the stability of the system and public conformity and skepticism. Political propaganda lost its edge but was an ever-present background of everyday life. It had succeeded in making the public believe in the social injustices of the capitalist West, as reported by the Soviet media, but failed in convincing many of the economic advantages of socialism. The gap between what was reported and what was observed at home was too wide.

The hopes and freedoms of the Liberalization were a major driving force behind the public’s desire to know and the Hermitage’s response to it. Once they were gone, the character of

Hermitage communications changed, although not quite as radically as before. Politically driven 47

interpretations of art and criticism of religion in Hermitage communications declined, while the impassioned humor of the 1960s gave way to lackluster political mantras in the 1970s. A side effect of this change was “the dulling of sharp edges,” or the gradual professionalization of

Hermitage communications.

Authority Figures and Markers

As the 1970s is the last period in the Soviet history of the Hermitage reviewed here, it is appropriate to look at it in retrospective. The loss of political intensity in Hermitage communications was exemplified by the treatment of an important political symbol, the Small

Dining Room in the Winter Palace, where the Provisional Government of Imperial Russia was arrested in October 1917 by the new revolutionary regime. In the 1920s, the former Imperial

Hermitage staff entirely avoided the topic of the arrest. Alexander Suslov only noted that the

Provisional Government was too close to the Hermitage, which endangered its collections on the night of the revolution (54), an ambiguous statement, to say the least. In the 1930s–early 1950s, once the Hermitage had turned into “a factory of political education”, the portrayal of the

Provisional Government became demonstratively derogatory: “frightened (that is, cowardly) ministers sneaked away into the adjacent room, where they were arrested” (Antonova et al.,

Populiarnyi 31); “precious paintings and marble statues were piled [by the Provisional

Government] in trunks and bags” (Varshavskii and Rest, Ermitazh 191); and “the provisional ministers were traitors and mortal enemies of the people” (Gubchevskii 14 [1953]). During the

Liberalization of the 1960s, the comments became brief and neutral: “the Small Dining Room is where the bourgeois Provisional Government was arrested” (Piotrovskii, Ermitazh 144); “the

Winter Palace was taken by assault and the Provisional Government was arrested,” (Berezina 48

and Lifshitz 8); “here, the last capitalist ministers of Russia were arrested” (Varshavskii and

Rest, Ryadom 146). Persianova added some details: “the Provisional Government had its last meeting on that October night . . . the ministers were arrested . . . in the Small Dining Room and taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress” (a political prison in St. Petersburg). A few lines from a popular poem describing the arrest followed. The caption under the photo read: “The Small

Dining Room of the Winter Palace, where, on the night of November 8 [according to the

Gregorian calendar], 1917, the ministers of the Provisional Government were arrested.”

(Sokrovishchnitsa 24-25). Finally, Shapiro’s words were uniquely derogatory: “the counterrevolutionary Provisional Government hated by the people was arrested…” The photo caption, however, simply stated: “The Small Dining Room” (Po Ermitazhu 166 [1965]). In 1972, the same harsh words were repeated in the new edition of Shapiro’s popular guidebook (Po

Ermitazhu 182). However, in 1973, only a year later, the Hermitage released two completely new guidebooks by the same veteran authors, Persianova and Shapiro. In the new Persianova, the information about the prison and the revolutionary poem were removed, and the photo caption was reduced to “The Small Dining Room of the Winter Palace” (Putevoditel’ 18). In the new

Shapiro, the Provisional Government was not “hated by the people” anymore, but simply arrested (Ermitazh i ego 19). Curiously, in 1976, the Hermitage released an English-language guidebook based, as the Hermitage claimed, on Shapiro’s original 1972 edition. Indeed, everything in that English-language guidebook was faithfully translated from Shapiro’s 1972 book, except the harsh words about the Provisional Government. Instead, the neutral excerpt about the Small Dining Room was taken from the 1973 edition.

References to communist authorities and the two most important political marker terms,

Soviet Union and October Revolution, were another indicator of the government’s political 49

engagement with the museum. In the 1920s, the old staff never mentioned either. In the 1930s, both markers, along with quotes from Marx, Lenin, and Stalin were abundant throughout the publications. In the 1960s, Stalin was taken out, and references to Marx and Lenin reduced, while the presence of the two marker terms increased to fill in the gaps. Now, in the 1970s, the introductions assumed the role of a formal part of the publication, included to please the government, which essentially freed the rest of the text from political references. Authorities and markers were referenced in introductions or in relation to the few political symbols of the

Hermitage, such as the Small Dining Room, where their use was unavoidable. Sometimes, political content was placed in specially designated sections, such as “From Great October to

1941” (Onufrieva et al. 245) or “The Hermitage after the Great October Socialist Revolution”

(Persianova, Putevoditel’ 11), which justified the elimination of political references from the rest of the text. For example, in Mythological Subjects, Marx appeared only in the introduction, a likely leftover from the previous 1966 edition of this book (Buslovich et al. 5, 9 [1978]);

Fekhner’s 17th Century Dutch Paintings did not mention any authorities; Kuznetzov’s Dutch

Paintings limited itself to Soviet government and October Revolution in the introduction (8); and

Shapiro did not refer to any authorities, while October Revolution appeared only in the description of the Small Dining Room and Soviet Union in the description of the map of the

USSR, a large installation that replaced the tsar’s throne in the Grand Throne Room of the

Winter Palace (Ermitazh 17, 221 [1980]).

Treatment of Religious Subjects

Comments on Christian symbols lost their satirical edge typical of the 1960s, while religious terminology slowly began its comeback. In the 1966 Mythological, Literary, and Historical 50

Subjects, the description of Cima da Conegliano’s Annunciation referred to Jesus as “the mythical founder of Christianity” (Buslovich et al. 56); the 1978 edition took the entire phrase out, as there was no need to denigrate the “founder” of that religion anymore (32). “Apostles

Peter and Paul are mythological characters” read the 1966 description of El Greco’s painting

(37), only to be eliminated in 1978; “Christ turned water into wine,” describing Garofalo’s

Marriage at Cana in 1966 (33), appeared as “Christ ‘transposed’ water into wine,” in 1978, where the colloquial phrase turned into was replaced with the biblical term transposed; in 1966,

Rubens’ Agar “left the house [of Abraham], but then returned” (246), while in 1978 “an angel came to Agar in the desert and ordered her to return” (134); the ironic “admirers of Christ,” who took his body off the cross in Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross in the 1966 description (224), was replaced with “followers of Christ” in 1978 (118); St. Augustine was “fanatically preaching

Christianity” in 1966 (62), but “zealously fought heresy” in 1978 (35); the Bible was “a rather random collection of ancient Hebrew stories” in 1966 (8) and “a collection of ancient Hebrew stories” in 1978 (8); and things were happening “according to the evangelical myth” in 1966 (33) and “according to the New Testament” in 1978 (20). The new edition of this popular book, which served as a source for the public to learn biblical stories, was published in 125,000 copies in 1978, compared to only 35,000 in 1966.

Further, in the 1930s–1960s, the name of Christ and its equivalents were carefully avoided in Hermitage communications. In contrast, beginning in the 1970s, authors felt free to name Christ and comment more extensively on religious iconography related to Christ. For example, in 1980, in a description of Leonardo’s Madonna Litta, Shapiro noted: “Christ holds a finch in his hand, which according to the legend He brought back to life” (Ermitazh 46). This comment is probably one of the first references to Christ’s name and the symbolism of the finch 51

in the description of this key Hermitage painting in the Soviet period. In El Greco’s Apostles

Peter and Paul, Peter was called “a disciple of Christ” and Paul was “a former persecutor of

Christians” turned “a faithful follower of Christ.” Also, Peter was described as “a symbol of hope for the atonement of sins by repentance,” information that was not directly relevant to El

Greco’s painting (58). None of Shapiro’s previous five guidebooks mentioned Christ, Christians, or who Peter and Paul were in the descriptions of this painting. In Jose Ribera’s St. Jerome,

Shapiro called the skull “a reminder of the transience of human existence,” painted “solidly and clearly in the foreground” (59) compared to “the skull, positioned in the lower corner of the painting, a reminder of death that awaits men, does not draw much of our attention” in his description of The Repenting Mary Magdalene by Titian in 1965 (Po Ermitazhu 52).

Characteristically, in 1980, Shapiro completely ignored the skull in The Repenting Mary

Magdalene, noting instead a small flask of myrrh in the background, a traditional symbol of

Mary Magdalene, the Myrrh Bearer (Ermitazh 51). This additional iconographic information was not necessary, but the authors chose to provide it to the readers.

There were no reading between the lines, elaborate language constructs, or any special efforts to please the censors anymore. The information was presented in a straightforward, professional manner. Yet museum visitors were turned off by the persistent presence of implicit propaganda, which continued to tell the same stories about the miserable life of the common man in the West, whether ancient, feudal, or modern, and about humanism, real life, and progressive forces. They could see right through the endless lookalike descriptions of color schemes and artistic techniques, which distracted from the true meaning of the idealistic paintings of the

Italian Renaissance or the biblical paintings of the Dutch Golden Age.

52

A compelling testimony to this fact was a widely popular comedy skit shown on national

TV about a tour guide discussing The Repentant Mary Magdalene by the Spanish artist El Greco:

An unsophisticated museum visitor like yourself might think that Magdalene is just a

sultry woman with a nice figure. Wrong! Every detail in this painting unwittingly defies

the Spanish Inquisition. Even the landscape behind Magdalene, with its dank grays and

repulsive browns, screams of the terrible daily lives of simple, downcast Spanish folks.

. . . The white lace and cloth covering Magdalene testify to the hard work of Spanish

laundresses, who day and night washed the underwear of the rich, who indulged in

luxury, wine, and women. (Shifrin)

Indeed, a typical guidebook description of this painting was not much different:

Despite the ascetic character of the biblical legend, Titian paints a lively, full-bodied

image of a Venetian woman. . . . While painting a sumptuous young beauty with

luxurious golden hair, the artist was carried away by the loveliness of her forms, her soft

and velvety skin, and her shinning, tear-filled eyes. (Shapiro, Po Ermitazhu 51-52 [1965])

Summary

Hermitage communications of this period reveal an important shift in the government’s policy and the character of the 1970s museum visitors. By this time, atheism was deeply entrenched in the Soviet people, and the government did not feel the need in its aggressive promotion. Further, new Soviet mythology based around such political symbols, as Lenin, the Great October

Revolution, and the Great Victory in the Great Patriotic War (the official Russian name for

World War II), were firmly rooted in people’s hearts and minds. Hermitage communications adjusted to this reality by lowering the intensity of the religious and political propaganda. 53

Without the frequent references to communist authorities and the inappropriate and at times offensive irony towards religion, the language of the Hermitage’s publications gradually grew more professional in the 1970s. It became less judgmental, more readable, and free of the excesses of the 1960s. “We are struck by the spaciousness and the exuberance of air and light,” wrote Iuri Shapiro about the Hermitage’s Main Staircase in 1965 (Po Ermitazhu 9). In 1972, this enthusiasm was softened to the simple “the Main Staircase is spacious, with plenty of light and air” (Po Ermitazhu 8).

The implicit messages generated by the communications in this period projected confidence in the status quo of the system and reiterated the importance of political symbols like the October Revolution and the Soviet Union, which lay at its foundation; they showed that the government allowed a certain degree of freedom in sharing information with readers; and they gave the Hermitage a more authoritative and detached image. The standardization of the language, the loss of authors’ individuality, the formal placement of the same political markers in prominent but designated places, and, in general, the more formal handling of the text all continued, as the country began moving towards Perestroika and the dissolution of the Soviet

Union, when the Hermitage’s communications underwent yet another transformation, acquiring the communication style we know today.

Conclusions

From 1917 to 1980, Russian history went through a series of distinct periods, from the

October Revolution and Stalin’s purges to Liberalization and Stagnation. For each of these periods, the government developed different political, social, and cultural priorities. A comparative analysis of Hermitage communications revealed a correlation between changes in 54

these priorities and changes in the implicit messages contained in Hermitage communications in all of the periods reviewed, regardless of their immediate policy goals. This means that implicit messages were used by the Hermitage as a universal tool of political, social, and cultural influence on museum visitors independent of the message’s content.

Implicit messages, as a tool, should be distinguished from the methods of delivering them. The comparative analysis identified the methods used by the Hermitage to deliver implicit messages to its visitors. Some methods were reused in different historical periods; others were developed to meet the specific policy objectives of a particular period. The delivery methods include repetitions, targeted placements, marker words, appeals to authority figures, statements of inclusion and exclusion, names of paintings, galleries, and exhibitions, language constructs and capitalization, writing style, glossaries, and iconography interpretations. These delivery methods also proved to be universal and independent of the content of the messages they delivered. As such, they may be used by any modern museum in its communications program, including as part of its social responsibility mission.

As noted earlier, a number of communication areas, such as Hermitage exhibitions, radio shows, children programs, lecture series, and postal products were excluded from this research.

Future research might reveal different types of delivery methods specific to these areas. A compilation of methods used across a wide spectrum of museum communications can help in their systematization and effective use in different museum departments, such as education, marketing, public relations, or exhibitions.

The application of comparative analysis to museum communications is new to the museum field. This project has demonstrated how this method may be used in practice, which opens opportunities for future research. In relation to the Hermitage, throughout the Soviet 55

period and to this day, this museum has been used to promote the government’s foreign policy.

Hermitage exhibitions and popular brochures closely followed the Soviet Union’s complex relationships with such countries as China, India, and Iran, and its own regions such as Central

Asia and the Caucasus. Rocky foreign relations between the Soviet Union and Israel and the nonverbalized domestic policy of antisemitism affected the Hermitage communications regarding the Jewish heritage, including works by Rembrandt.

However, the proposed method may be applied to any museum, country, or historical period. As an example, it may help explore changes in museum communications in the United

States, which went through its own distinct historical periods, or in the time of the French revolution of 1789, which faced similar problems as the Russian revolution, including the nationalization of the Louvre and the portraits of the royal family, which had monetary and artistic value, but contradicted the new revolutionary ideology. For modern museums, this research method may explore the impact of implicit messages in museum communications on inclusion and exclusion, cultural narratives, and visitors’ learning and behavior, to name a few.

Importantly, this project hopes to draw attention to museum communications as valuable but traditionally overlooked primary sources. The project demonstrated that museum communications contain not only factual information, but also values, beliefs, and attitudes of people who created them. Comparative analysis of museum communications helps uncover these layers of cultural information. Being implicit, such information may be especially valuable, as it is generated at the nonverbalized, often subconscious, level and is difficult to manipulate. It speaks the truth, and in this sense it is akin to body language or physiological reactions that point to the true intent of the spoken words. As such, this information may be of interest to professionals in many fields, including government policy, cultural studies, or human 56

psychology. Museum communications with their abundance of implicit messages form an important part of humanity’s record and in this sense far surpass their immediate utility and the narrow interest of museum and art historians.

57

Works Cited

“The Announcement of the Hermitage and the Winter Palace to be State Museums.” The State

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