History of the St. Petersburg

The exhibitions presents the most important stages in the artistic and historical past of the Tadjik, Uzbek, Turkmen, Kazakh and Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republics.

Preserved in the Hermitage are more than one hundred and forty thousand items pertaining to the culture and art of the various peoples of the East. This Eastern department was set up in 1920 upon the initiative of the distinguished Soviet scholar and orientalist J. Orbeli.

The department of prehistoric culture was created in 1931 upon the basis of the vast amount of material collected by Soviet archaeologists, supplemented by groups of relics of the past (the Siberian collection, the Scythian antiquities, etc.) preserved in the Hermitage before the October Revolution.

The Hermitage is rightly called the treasure house of Russian semi-precious stone. Numerous vases, bowls, candelabra and table-tops cut out of semi-precious stones from the Urals and Altai, and now housed in the museum, were created in the nineteenth century in the lapidary works of Peterhof, Kolyvan and Ekaterinburg.

The first three rooms contain exhibits which give a general picture of the social history of Russia in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. There are portraits of the representatives of the main social classes of the Russian state, examples of costumes of that period, and also prints showing towns and villages.

Room 163 contains material devoted to the work and activities of Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765). As a result of many experiments.

Most of the items in the exhibition come from the memorial museum of Peter the Great (called Peter the Great’s Study) founded shortly after his death and attached to the Kunstkammer (Cabinet of Curios) of the Academy of Sciences.

The exhibition begins with archaeological material of the twelfth to seventeenth century found on excavation sites in Moscow. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are represented in the Hermitage by a limited number of items, reflecting but a few of the aspects of the cultural development of Muscovite Russia, a strong centralized state which had unified the: various’ lands of Russia.

The exhibition consists basically of material obtained in recent years by Soviet scholars during archaeological research on ancient Slavonic settlements and burial-grounds, and on old Russian towns.

Rooms on the first floor of the Winter Palace contain the collections of the museum’s youngest department – that devoted to the history of Russian culture, created in 1941. At present the department includes the following exhibitions: The Culture of Old Russia, 6th-15th centuries; The Culture of Muscovite Russia, 15th-17th centuries; Russian Culture, 1700-25; Russian Culture, 1740-1800; and Russian Culture, 1800-60. Included in the exhibition in the Department of Russian Culture are the state apartments of the Winter Palace, which have both artistic and historical significance.