A
Lessons Learned or Case Study of
Derived from the book
“The State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, the Soviet Union,
During World War II (The Great Patriotic War)”
[No one, especially a cultural
institution manager or its staff, wishes to admit before or during an armed
conflict that worse conditions and will occur. Nor can many cultural
institutions physically or psychologically prepare beforehand, when it would be
easier to prepare for "the unthinkable." Every cultural institution
manager and designated protection chief should be obligated to think about it
in advance and prepare contingency plans, as good risk management business
practice.
This is a lessons learned or case
study of museum survival, to introduce the reader to "some" wartime
conditions such as bombardment and siege, which occurred at the State Hermitage
Museum, which will occur again in other places, perhaps in slight variations.
This document is written to give the reader the feeling and the facts of one
situation, for the reader to apply and "role play" in new situations.
Let us all learn from each other's experiences.
Since the war of the European
continent of the 1940's, "war" has become more varied and complex,
and combatant leaders justify destroying their opponent's culture as well,
including treasures, records, and symbols, in government buildings, museums,
archives, monuments and libraries. During wartime operations, opposing forces
will usually if not regularly attempt to purposely destroy institutions that
represent the opponent's culture. Please consider what we can do to save not
only our own culture, but ALL cultures. David Liston, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, DC]
On 22 June 1941 the German
Government's Third Reich invaded the Soviet Union, war was declared, and the
Soviet Government instructed the State Hermitage staff to prepare for
collection evacuation "soon." Hermitage
keepers, curators, researchers, librarians, restorers, watchmen, attendants and
cleaners responded at once to the call from Moscow to prepare immediately for
evacuation. "Hermitage staff listed as air raid wardens were henceforth to
stay in the museum round the clock." Contingency plans pre-existed and
many supplies were already on site. Evacuation packing inventories matched
cases already stencilled with similar numbers.
On 23 June 1941 air raid sirens
started over Leningrad and for six days and nights the amplified Hermitage
staff removed over a million objects from exhibit, brought up from storage crates and packing materials for them, and
packed objects, as Stage I collection evacuation, primarily objects from
exhibit.
Large paintings were taken down, removed from frames, and packed flat in frames. Pictures of small and medium format
were packed in cases with divided slots. Pastels
were left in their glass frames, had paper glued to the glass cover, and packed
against plywood pieces. Drawings and
engravings were wrapped in tissue and packed in cardboard boxes. Small items were embedded individually
in cotton wool and pads of shavings, deposited in boxes, and laid in shavings
in crates. The coin collection that
was already laid out on cloth‑lined trays in cabinets were inventoried,
surrounded in tissue paper that was twisted around it, wrapped in cotton wool,
and put into envelopes of stiff paper. They were assisted by the Hermitage
guide staff. Special cases and packing were
required: Rembrandt's "Return of
the Prodigal Son" had a special case. The 1.5-ton sarcophagus of Alexander Nevsky was one of the heaviest. Michelangelo's "the Crouching
Boy" was fitted into a double‑walled crate. The Chertomlyk amphora had first to be
filled by hand with bits of cork.
Houdon's statue of Voltaire
required special handling because of its weight.
On 1 July 1941 about midnight trucks
loaded up at the Hermitage and left under armed escort, to take Stage I collection materials to a special train at the
Leningrad railway shipping depot. The train included pullman and freight cars,
a car for Hermitage staff, one for the armed escort, and open platforms at
either end of the train for anti‑aircraft and machine‑guns. Two
engines pulled the train and a third engine went ahead to clear the tracks.
On 6 July 1941 in the morning the
Stage I Hermitage Evacuation train arrived at the Sverdlovsk railway station after five days of travel, with unloading at once and with the steel‑plated
freight car to take priority. The collections were trucked to three buildings
specially assigned: the local picture gallery, the building of a former
Catholic church and the Museum of Atheism, which were filled to the ceiling
high with the crates and boxes from Leningrad.
On 20 July 1941 the Stage II
collection evacuation began, primarily as objects from reserves\storage. The shipment was seven hundred thousand Hermitage works of art, which
left in four hundred and twenty‑two crates on twenty‑three trucks.
The second evacuation included everything possible to move because of the
worsening war situation at the fighting fronts. The two stages of evacuation
cleared 1.5 million well-packed collection objects from Leningrad and used
fifty tons of wood shavings, three tons of cotton wool and sixteen kilometers
of oil-cloth.
On 21 July 1941 the first bombs fell
on Leningrad. Air raids required blackout lighting
conditions and regular retreats to air raid shelters in the cellars. Bombing
and artillery shell hits required building inspections, removal of damaged or
threatened collection objects, and building repair whenever possible,
especially closure to adverse weather.
On 30 August 1941 the Stage III
collection evacuation of three hundred and fifty-one crates was canceled because Nazi forces cut the last open railway line the day before.
There was planking but no carpenters. Packaging materials were already
consumed, which forced Hermitage staff to solicit boxes of wood, cardboard and
other materials for packaging from local food stores and shops. The crated
Stage III Hermitage collection did not leave but remained packed in their cases
on the ground floor for the remainder of the war.
On 4 September 1941 the first
long-range artillery hit the city. On 6 September 1941 the first bombs fell
from airplanes. On 21 September 1941 all Leningrad citizens were called to
volunteer to defend the city. On 7 October 1941 Hitler vowed to completely
destroy the city.
During 1941, Army experts made a
structural evaluation of the Hermitage and determined that the vaulting and
walls of the ground floor and of the palace basements were massive enough to
withstand the destructive power of the biggest blockbuster bomb and the largest
artillery shell. The museum staff worked as movers and
riggers to move from the upper floors to safer places thousands of items that
were in the museum reserves/storage and remained unpacked. Unique pieces not
removed because of their fragility or excessive weight were moved to first‑floor
rooms or protected in place with planking and sandbags. Heavy marble and bronze
objects and elegant pieces of furniture that could be dismantled were taken
apart and brought down to the ground floor piece by piece. Everything not
evacuated was carried to ground‑floor rooms and cellars, including tabletops,
torches and massive vases. Porcelain that were left behind was carried to the
cellar and half covered with sand on the stone floor.
For building fire fighting and object
blast protection, a large quantity of sand was brought by barge up the Neva River, through the Winter Canal, piled in one of
the Hermitage's inner courtyards, and moved by hand to all floors and attics of
the palace, the highest being twenty‑eight meters. Glass windows were glued with tape and broken ones replaced with
plywood, as long as plywood remained available.
Every Hermitage staff member was
recruited to work for city defence and for Hermitage
museum emergency teams in order to protect the country, the city, the buildings
and the collections which were not evacuated. Air alerts were announced over
the radio, and Hermitage air raid
wardens (ARP teams) hurried each time to "take their posts in the
halls, on the rooftops and by the doors and gates. "During the autumn and
winter of 1941‑42 there used to be as many as ten to twelve air‑raid
alerts sounded daily." Fire‑fighting
teams, many recruited from researchers, did a fine job contributing
significantly to save its buildings. The Museum was on the priority list of the
city's fire brigade. As soon as the war began, the number of fire‑warden
posts at the Hermitage was greatly increased. Crash rescue teams performed emergency building repair and
restoration work. They "speedily and with surprising dexterity and skill
undertook to make good the breakdowns and damage caused to the buildings by the
shelling and bombardment." The
young and fit museum staff volunteered or was asked to serve in military
service and defense forces. Hermitage
staff who were not well physically fit for such service stayed to work on
collection evacuation, stand air raid watches, serve in emergency response
teams, work in the Hermitage convalescent center when it was open, and
volunteer to defend the city digging trenches and putting up anti‑tank
barriers.
Hermitage staff regularly packed and
moved museum objects around inside the museum during the war. At first the staff prepared the three stages of collection evacuation.
Then they consolidated collection objects to safer locations, rescued objects
from damaged parts of the building, and served on emergency teams. There was
little time for fear or despair. Winter brought severe cold to people and snow
and ice to the building, especially where the building was left open to damage
from the weather. The Soviet Academy of
Sciences and the Hermitage's Solianoi Pereulok Building evacuated their
collections into the Hermitage. Staff continued to move valuable
collections to safer and drier premises, to check on collection conservation
conditions, to protect objects including rugs, carpets, tapestries, textiles
from deterioration from moths and mold, and metallic objects from corrosion and
tin plague.
Through October 1941 Hermitage staff continued their academic research and writing whenever
there was time and opportunity, "pulling out drawers... of unfinished
studies and treatises..." In October Hermitage staff celebrated the 800th
anniversary of the Azerbaijanian poet and thinker Nizami of Gianja, and the
following year the 500th anniversary of the Uzbek poet Alisher Navoi, which
continued for three days.
In November and December of 1941,
living conditions were dark, cold, and quiet, without much electricity or
heating, under blackout conditions. A bulletin
board inside the staff door was the most universal means of notice and
communication. It posted war news of museum staff (including deaths), staff
schedules, and duties, which varied seasonally according to wartime activities,
threats to the building and collections, and available daylight. Air raid
wardens were assigned to posts in the building day and night in every season
and weather condition. Between wartime actions, the Hermitage echoed with the
sounds of carpentry, crate moving, and the human efforts to move materials up
and down stairs and across the five buildings of the museum. Staff was
regularly scheduled and busy to make building repairs and cleaning. During
wartime action, air raids and sirens, ack-ack, airplane engines, tracers and
flares at night, aerial and artillery bombardment near and far, explosion
impacts, emergency sirens, human shouts measured the time, and the lingering
smells of smoke and cordite. In the neighborhood, military vehicles moved up
and down the streets, especially along the embankment. One saw barrage balloons
by day and searchlights by night. Loudspeaker announcements broadcast from
moving vehicles. Ack-ack and machine guns were mounted, tested and shot from
rooftops. Tank barriers were built at street corners. People's volunteers
drilled in the streets. In the winter, very little could be seen from outside
except the rare smoke from a stove. In the summer, staff and families ventured
out to dry objects in the direct sunlight, tend vegetable gardens of carrots,
cabbage and onions, and "enjoy the sun."
In the autumn and winter of 1941 some
two thousand people lived in the Hermitage's cellars, which were converted into
twelve air‑raid shelters when the war broke out. This included Hermitage staff, families, and noted people in science
and the arts. With the carpenters and masons gone to the front, researchers
bricked up the basement windows, reinforced the doors with iron plating,
knocked together crude sleeping benches and brought down tables and chairs.
They offered fairly reliable protection for the occupants when shells and bombs
burst overhead.
On 8 November 1941 supply lines across
Lake Ladoga closed, with daily bread rations for factory
workers cut to 300 grams a day, then 250 grams, and half those amounts for
children under twelve. It had become "the Road of Life."
From December 1941 to Spring 1942 the
Ship "Poliarnaya Zvezda" or "Pole Star" provided Hermitage
electricity when the city electrical grid died that fall. The ship was tied up on the Neva River next to the Hermitage and
supplied limited electricity to a few rooms in the building. The boat was the
former pleasure yacht of the imperial family, now an auxiliary vessel for the
submarine squadron, whose commander was recognized on the walls of the
Hermitage and repaid his recognition with electricity.
During the winters of 1941 through
1944, siege conditions depreciated the quality of life to starvation, illness
or injury and freezing death for tens of
thousands of Leningrad citizens per month. Heating for other than cooking was a
rare luxury. Food shortages created incredible specialty foods such as
"joiner's glue jelly" and "drying oil fritters," made from
the frying of discarded potato peelings.
In January 1942 water pipes burst in
the cellars, unseen, and streams of water gushed in, to flood all the porcelain
buried in the sand. "We descended into the dark
cellars in rubber waders into water up to our knees. Placing each foot down
carefully, so as not to step on these fragile objects, we felt around to pluck
out object after object. Some of the dishes and plates floated on the surface.
Though the necks of some of the taller vases jutted out above the water, most
of the items, which were clogged up with sand and filth, had settled on the
floor. Feeling the way with feet only, we could hardly believe it." The
unglazed white china had absorbed the water and yellowed. Many items that were
restored came apart. The huge cut‑glass
chandeliers had also been inundated, even though ropes to trestles slung
them up for the purpose. Objects came from the water without their respective
inventory labels, with hundreds floating around, causing terrible confusion.
Staff left the porcelain to dry out in the yard in the spring sunshine on top
of sacking or right out on the green grass. A company of army school cadets were assigned to assist the
Hermitage salvage work, who had recently moved into Leningrad across Lake
Ladoga to go through a course of officer training.
In January 1942 the "Road of
Life" reopened across Lake Ladoga, which increased bread rations and
improved living conditions. In February 1942 museum staff were asked to
evacuate in order to "mothball" the museum until the end of the
war. During the winters across Lake Ladoga a "Road of Life" permitted
some breaks in the 900-day siege. During the winter, excessive deaths turned
air raid shelters in the cellars into morgues for 46 bodies and staff moved
upstairs to live. As corpses could be moved, they were taken to common graves
on what was once the fringe of the city. Corpses were stacked in the winter for
burial later, in the spring.
In January 1942 Leningrad City
Government opened a convalescent center in the Hermitage, and in four other
museums. In one week a hundred cots were set up, with Hermitage
keepers and curators appointed to tend the sick. The center continued until May
1.
From January to April 1942 enemy
shelling was heavy. On 18 March six shells exploded on
the grounds. One large caliber shell hit the walls facing the Kitchen Yard
which destroyed part of the wall, completely shattering 3 000 windowpanes,
including the large Main Staircase windows.
In the Spring of 1942 winter's effects
and war destruction were reversed. Because the
streets were buried in snow drifts, long icicles drooped from the eaves,
pavements completely frozen over, with piles of filth lay everywhere, garbage
which cluttered courtyards, and roads strewn with rubble, the city undertook a
massive city spring cleaning. Day after day three hundred thousand Leningraders
worked from dawn till dusk to clear away the snow, ice, muck and rubble,
handling picks, shovels and brooms and keeping the roadways such as the Palace
Embankment free for army traffic, since they were right behind the front lines.
Hermitage staff did their job, too, to clear the entire sprawling grounds of
the Hermitage buildings of the ice and the snow, the muck and the rubbish,
scouring cluttered‑up yards, attics and cellars, sewage pipes, and every
nook or cranny where there might be filth, where the rays of the spring sun
could develop them into breeding grounds of contagion and disease. After
exhausting labors, one could walk along the broad streets and splendid
embankments that seemed swept clean "as if by one gigantic broom."
In the Spring of 1942 snow on the rooftops melted away releasing water that dripped through
the fragment‑riddled roofs. From the attics the water ran down further
into the rooms themselves, to splotch the ceilings and their painted panels with
dark and ugly stains. Pails and basins that were strategically placed in the
attics did not help much, whic were filled to overflowing almost before they
were set in place. Everything humanly possible was done to patch the roofs with
burlap and sacking, but the moment one hole was plugged up, another would
appear somewhere else. Water from rooms with large skylights flooded down upon
the parquet flooring of the central rooms, combined with building debris and
sand, to create one watery sea of rubble. Elderly lady curators climbed up onto
the roofs and tried to lash plywood boards to the skylight frames with wire.
But each sharp gust of wind would dislodge the boards and again the melting
snow was dripped down to warp, buckle and swell the parquet floors inside.
Painted ceiling panels darkened and
moisture accumulated on the walls, mirrors and columns. After squeezing water into pails with soaking rags which they used to
take up the moisture, the little old ladies then went outside to help clear the
yards.
The antique furniture in the former
palace mews deteriorated. The walls exuded dampness that
filled the air and was soaked up by the wood. The furniture oozed moisture and
the upholstery was covered with mildew. They made use of every sunny day to drag
out all the upholstered furniture into the courtyard to be dried in the sun.
Upholstery on the couches and chairs was covered with a thick, furry layer of
revolting, hideous yellow‑green mildew, which, when sundried and brushed
off, created clouds of dust and the acrid fumes of sulphide that affected
clothes, eyes, noses and throats.
By May of 1942 most supplies dwindled
away, except for a supply of vitamins from Moscow. Trains ran for a while, then trams ran for a while, then persons
depended on military vehicles with petrol. Then there were only horse drawn
civilian vehicles, and a lot of walking, with sledding in the winters.
In May and June 1942 shelling became
heavy again. On 8 May 1942 a member of the fire‑fighting team was killed
on the spot during one of the regular air raids. Nazi long‑range artillery bombarded the Winter Palace and tossed
a shell into a place where mildewed furniture was being cleaned, where a
fire-fighting team member was posted. On 12 May 1942 a shall exploded outside
the Main Entrance to the Palace Embankment and one into the depository of
antique coaches, with a 70 mm caliber shell which hit the same place again on
18 June.
In the summer of 1942 good weather
permitted the staff to take better stock of the building's condition. Broken cornices, peeling stucco and heavily pocked masonry, scarred
towering palace buildings. Drying in the inner courtyards were antique pieces
of furniture ringed the by that mountain of sand which had piled in a Hermitage
courtyard on the Winter Canal. On top of the sand sat elderly ladies from the
museum guard, stretching out their
"scurvy‑swollen black‑splotched legs, enjoying the
warmth, and listening to the distant explosions of bursting shells."
From autumn 1942 until the restoration
of city electricity, the Icebreaker "Yermak" provided limited
electricity to the Hermitage. Museum
electrical power was limited to one room and battery power for safety light
bulb devices scattered throughout the museums.
From January to March of 1943 the Hermitage staff manually removed from the buildings eighty tons of
broken glass and snow, including tons of ice, chipped not from streets or
courtyards but from the floors, walls and even ceilings of rooms.
The warm moisture of early spring 1943
affected the building very badly. Water oozed from
the frozen walls, saturated the inside air and settled, more intensively than
during the spring of 1942, on the cold marble, the mirrors, the bronze
mountings and the stone vases. Molding cracked off the ceiling and the
cornices, and the gilding of the Main Staircase lost its glitter and peeled.
Paint hung suspended in ragged tufts from the denuded, rusting metal beneath.
The spring of 1943 was a long
exhausting battle against dampness. Everything
humanly possible was done to repel and resist the attacking moisture to protect
the building and its collections from corrosion and the tin plague, from the
mildew and the furniture beetle, and from the swelling and peeling of paint.
Roots of the trees in the Hanging Garden
penetrated the lead plating beneath and damaged the waterproofing. Downspout pipes from the Hanging Garden into the drains clogged up with
refuse and ice, which re-routed water and muck into the story below, then into
the palace mews as an unending deluge.
In June 1943 Mrs. Tatyana Tess wrote a
newspaper article on conditions at the Hermitage. This noted Soviet newspaperwoman and special correspondent represented
the Moscow newspaper "Izvestia." Many readers wanted to know that the
Hermitage had survived, and read about its faithful museum staff.
During the autumn of 1943, the
Government opened a school to train highly‑skilled craft specialists
including builders, house‑painters, painters, molders, stained‑glass
artists, marble cutters, mosaicists, woodcarvers, gilders, goldsmiths, and
cabinet‑makers. In the spring and summer of 1944 this municipal trade school recruited
its first trainees for molder, mason and gilder. These specialists
eventually carried out restoration and other work at the Hermitage.
On 20 January 1944 the Hermitage
blockade supply list was very sparse: fifteen litres
of kerosene oil, five boxes of matches and fifteen candles. The local supply
request asked for five and a half cubic meters of plywood.
In the summer of 1944 the Hermitage
staff cleaned and repaired everything possible. They removed the piles of sand and rubbish, cleaning the Pavilion Hall
and the Galleries by autumn. They tore down weather‑warped plywood from
the boarded‑up windows, reglazed the windows themselves, cleaned and
rehung chandeliers, waxed and polished 1 500 square meters of wood parquet
floors in the exhibition rooms. House‑painters, glaziers, plumbers,
masons, roofers and plasterers, cabinet‑makers, modellers, upholsterers,
gilders, and workers in mosaic and marble put up scaffolding everywhere both outside and inside.
On 24 August 1944 Hermitage Director
Iosif Orbeli in Moscow was advised to prepare a detailed plan for the capital
repair of the Hermitage Museum buildings, the return of the evacuated collections,
and the restoration of the main exhibition rooms and depositories. He ordered: sixty‑five tons of gypsum plaster, eighty tons of
alabaster, one hundred tons of cement, two tons of joiner's glue, forty tons of
chalk plaster, thirty tons of chipped chalk, one hundred tons of asphalt
mastic, thirty tons of ground pigments, twenty tons of dry pigments, ten tons
of white lead, twenty tons of linseed oil, four thousand square meters of plate
glass, four thousand square meters of Bohemian glass of treble hardness, eight
thousand square meters of similar glass of double hardness, two thousand square
meters of extra‑fine glass, two thousand square meters of assorted
canvas, thirty thousand square meters of decorative fabrics, two tons of
casting bronze, two tons of sheet bronze and six kilograms of gold leaf.
On 8 Nov 1944 wartime Hermitage
exhibition opened in a small area, representing all
Hermitage Museum departments. The opening centrepiece was a bust of the Roman
Emperor Marcus Aurelius which partisans brought to the Hermitage in 1944 after
finding it next to a derailed a Nazi freight train which carried metal scrap
back to Germany.
On 9 May 1945 everyone celebrated the
end of the war, with crowds in Palace Square outside the Hermitage. Among those returning were Hermitage staff, family and friends who had
gone out to the fighting fronts and who were evacuated throughout the distant
hinterland.
Days afterwards, the Soviet Government
issued an order to move evacuated State Hermitage Museum collections back to
Leningrad. A month later, Hermitage Director Orbeli cabled
Sverdlovsk that everything was ready.
On 7 October 1945 at daybreak two
special‑purpose freight trains left the Sverdlovsk freight depot, the
second one an hour after the first. The two trains carried the entire evacuated
inventory of the Hermitage.
On 10 October 1945 the evacuated
Hermitage collections arrived safely in Leningrad. A convoy of trucks loaded with sealed boxes and crates returned the
collection to the museum from the railway station to the museum. With the
Hermitage still covered by scaffolding and just newly repainted, the staff
directed the trucks to unload on the embankment side where the scaffolding was
already removed.
On 11 October 1945 Leningrad
newspapers announced the safe return of the Hermitage collections, which had
occurred on the preceding day.
On 13 October 1945 the evacuated
collections were unloaded between 8:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. Curators stood in much the same manner as four years earlier,
inventorying the lettering and figures stencilled on the boxes and crates
against the corresponding letters and figures in the way bills and travel
documents. "... no breakdowns, unfortunate occurrences or discrepancies
during the evacuation return..." they reported to the State Committee for
Art Affairs in Moscow.
On 4 November 1945 staff began to
re-hang the artwork. Crates were carried in and deposited
on the floor of the sixty‑eight rooms that were repaired and tidied, and
curators unpacked them, leaving piles of shavings, clumps of cotton wool,
wrinkled paper and oil‑cloth litter again. Collections were returned to
where they had stood, hung or lain before the war in order to reassure
Leningrad's art loving population that everything was back to normal and would
be as it was before.
On 14 November 1945, the first sixty‑eight
of the Hermitage rooms and halls reopened to the public through doors to the
Palace Square, in similar splendour to that of the
pre-war Hermitage four years prior. With the celebration of the twenty‑eighth
anniversary of the October Revolution, Leningrad was decorated with red bunting
for the festive event. The elderly
little ladies serving as room attendants [re]took their places in the gilt
plush chairs on the different floors. Visitors and guests invited for the
opening gathered on the ceremonial staircase of the New Hermitage: those who
had worked there, officers and men of the victorious armed forces, factory
workers and engineers, building workers who had restored the museum, professors
and students of Leningrad University, Academy of Arts and Conservatory, and
city and government representatives. They were welcomed by the Hermitage staff:
those who had stood guard there during the 900‑days of siege, those who
had protected the collections in Sverdlosk, and Hermitage Director Iosif Orbeli
who simply raised his hand and declared "The Hermitage is open!"
On 25 November 1945 the Main Entrance
on the Palace Embankment side was reopened. Years
later, after full restoration work, three hundred and forty‑five rooms
were opened for display, and the Hermitage continued on with other
improvements.