Dictator Museums
June 28 2022
The director of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Mikhail Piotrovsky, has given an extraordinary interview to the Russian newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta in which he declares himself unashamedly on the side of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The sadest part is that he also makes it clear he is directing the Hermitage to become a tool of Putin's new militarist nationalism. There's a summary of the interview in English here in The Art Newspaper.
Piotrovsky inherited the position of director in 1990 from his father, Boris, who had been director since 1964. Which is all a bit North Korean, if you think about it, but perhaps when people owe their jobs to politics, rather than competence, it's not surprising they leap to defend their political masters.
