Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky knows all the secrets of his museum, and he’s keeping them

The front cover of this book describes the Hermitage as ‘the Greatest Museum in the World’. That sobriquet must go to the Louvre. The Hermitage is perhaps the second greatest, one which its current director Mikhail Piotrovsky calls an ‘encyclopaedic’ museum, housing ‘the culture of humanity, which is represented in all its variety…’ Not quite. Like the Louvre or the other encyclopaedic museums, the Met in New York say, or the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna, it does not incorporate primitive or folk art. London doesn’t have anything directly comparable: it would be as though the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Victoria and Albert, the Royal Collections and a bit of Tate Modern were all rolled into one.

We learn that it currently attracts three million visitors a year, whereas in the late Soviet era it was four million. Immediately after the collapse of communism it went down to one million, and this was the period when I lived a few doors away from it on Ulitsa Khalturina and came to know the Hermitage well. It was so quiet, especially in winter: the best time to visit. You could wander in and out for a very modest fee. A friend of mine worked there, but there was no work for him to do, so he was always on holiday and would take me behind the scenes. The restoration department seemed to have come from the late Renaissance. Among the staff, you saw something you don’t always see in Russia, happy people with bright eyes, smiling and making jokes (well, they do work in the most delicious place in town). Football was played in its inner courtyards. There were dancing bears by the south portico, and gypsies covered in soot rushed at you in Palace Square. One day I saw boys staving in the basement windows of the General Staff building with the front wheels of their bicycles — something had to change, and it did.