The second half of the nineteenth century or, more precisely, the period from Nicholas’s death in 1855 to the outbreak of revolution in 1917, was marked in Russia by massive social change. This period witnessed the belated industrialisation of the nation, underground agitation for political reform which cut the tsars off from the people and put their lives at risk (Alexander II was assassinated in 1881), and extraordinary achievements in the spheres of literature, music and the arts. From now on, the tsars took only a limited interest in the Hermitage, which they came to regard rather as an ‘institution’ than their own, private collection.
The museum itself, after the fanfare that accompanied its opening in 1852, entered a period of stagnation, relieved by occasional bursts of activity when new directors were appointed. From the 1850s onwards, the moulding of the museum’s character slipped out of the hands of the imperial family and into those of professional administrators. In 1863 the post of ‘director’ of the museum was instituted and filled by Stepan Gedeonov, who was also given charge of the Imperial Theatres four years later. He cultivated the acquaintance of collectors and found some great works of art which he persuaded the emperor to buy – but it was now the administrator’s taste and ingenuity that led the way rather than the emperor’s.
Even the emperors became muddled over the status of their collection. In 1905, the Ministry of the Imperial Court asked the Hermitage to clarify ‘whether we can consider the artistic works located in the Imperial Hermitage as the property of the museum, or if, in the collection, there are works which form the property of His Imperial Majesty’. To this enquiry the museum replied:
The administration of the Imperial Hermitage has the honour to tell you that the pictures and other treasures of the Hermitage have always, from the time of Catherine II, formed the property of the reigning emperors, in the same way as objects decorating imperial palaces, only allocated from among their artistic possessions to be shown in the said museum. Everything kept in it must be considered the property of His Imperial Highness.
This, no doubt, was true in juridical terms. However, as the Ministry’s enquiry highlights, the museum had already come to be regarded more in the light of a National Gallery than an imperial collection. To understand how it evolved from one to the other in the course of the nineteenth century, it is necessary to look at the changing character of Russia in general and of St Petersburg in particular.
The hands-on government of Nicholas I had required a vast army of clerks to shuffle paper and they poured into St Petersburg from all over the empire, hoping to make their fortunes but ending up impoverished, overworked and disillusioned. The mysterious appeal that St Petersburg exerted over provincial Russia is described in Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Diary of a Provincial in Petersburg, published in 1872:
We provincials somehow turn our steps towards Petersburg instinctively…. A particular individual will be sitting around and suddenly, as if a light had dawned, he begins to pack his things. ‘You’re going to Petersburg?’ – ‘To Petersburg!’ is the answer. And that is all that needs to be said. It is as if Petersburg, all by itself, with its name, its streets, its fog, rain and snow could resolve something or shed light on something.
In the wake of the clerks came factory workers as the industrial revolution finally reached Russia. Until the 1860s they were principally serfs, single men who were still required to send a percentage of their earnings to their owner back home.
St Petersburg soon began to run out of space to accommodate its vast new population. The habit of living in an apartment, rather than a house, was adopted by the nobility around the 1820s and became the norm with St Petersburg’s new middle classes; large quantities of apartment blocks began to mingle with the city’s imperial monuments. Then, in the second half of the century, the imperial city was gradually ringed by an industrial quarter, combining factories and slums – some industrial workers rented no more than a bed-sized space on the floor of a large room.
The spread of education brought a new class known as the ‘intelligentsia’ into existence. Nowadays the term only means people with higher education, but when the Russians first invented it, ‘intelligentsia’ carried a connotation of radical opposition to the existing regime – the police state had turned the educated elite against the government. Nervous of the revolutions which shook a succession of European countries in the mid-nineteenth century, the Russian tsars imposed censorship and diligently sought to suppress free thought. It is a curious reflection on Russia that the intelligentsia was censored, arrested, sentenced to exile and hard labour under the tsars just as it was under the Soviets, although conditions in Siberia were better in the nineteenth century than the twentieth.
The museum became a department of the Ministry of the Court in the 1860s and thus, formally, one of the responsibilities of Russia’s vast and highly structured civil service. In nineteenth-century street directories it was not listed among museums but with the other institutions of the Imperial Court – the Imperial Hunt, the Stables, the Palace Police, the Library and so on. Thus, even if the tsars were taking little interest in its collections, the Hermitage remained within their close sphere of influence and, as in all other periods, politics dictated both the museum’s opportunities and its limitations. In the succession of Nicholases and Alexanders who ruled Russia in the decades leading up to the Revolution each, naturally, had his own impact on the museum’s development.
Nicholas I had instituted his infamous ‘Third Section’ in the late 1820s in reaction to the Decembrist ‘uprising’, a secret police force with a licence to spy on the ordinary citizen. And it was left to his heir, Alexander II, to unscramble the social ills of his father’s policies – as well as deal with the Crimean War, which had broken out in 1853. Alexander was thus driven, despite his conservative upbringing, to a radical legislative programme, later known as the Great Reforms. He emancipated the serfs in 1861 and within a decade of his accession had instituted a new elective system of local government, replaced trial by secret tribunal with trial by jury and made the judiciary independent of government.
He was not thanked for it. Political opposition, suppressed for so long, broke out in a flood of revolutionary activity. In 1866 a disaffected student shot at Alexander in the Summer Gardens, but missed, and the Emperor spent the rest of his life under threat. In 1881 a group of terrorists, calling themselves the Party of the People’s Will, who had opened a cheese shop on a St Petersburg street frequently used by the emperor’s carriage, succeeded in killing him with homemade hand grenades.
Alexander’s significance, from the point of view of the Hermitage and its collections, lies in his having bought a miscellany of contemporary European paintings under the guidance of his tutor Vasily Zhukovsky, in having commissioned a major series of watercolour paintings of the Winter Palace interiors, in being the recipient of some of Colt’s most spectacular presentation pistols, in founding the Imperial Archaeological Commission, and in appointing the first professional director of the museum. The two last were easily Alexander’s most important legacy.
The foundation of the Imperial Archaeological Commission in 1859 was to have far reaching significance for the museum. Many of the important treasures held in today’s Oriental, Archaeological and Antiquities Departments reached the museum through the agency of the Commission. Before it came into existence there had been little distinction between archaeology and tomb robbing. Anyone with an amateur interest could try their hand at excavating.
After 1859 the Commission controlled which archaeological sites were excavated and by whom; all chance finds, which were made quite frequently during farming or the building of roads and railways, were supposed to be reported to the Commission; the Commission decided where newly discovered artefacts should be housed and channelled all discoveries of special artistic merit to the Hermitage. The commissioners were a mix of scholars and cultured noblemen with a keen amateur interest in archaeology. They had a small support staff with an office, first in the Stroganov Palace and later in the Hermitage itself.
The Commission started small and grew in importance. Towards the end of the century, in addition to licensing digs and allocating discoveries, it became increasingly involved in archaeological publications. This was of great advantage to the Hermitage. Unlike the archaeological collections of other museums, most of the pieces in the Hermitage have a known find spot and the circumstances of their discovery are documented. In other words, they have a history.
The vast territories of the Russian empire were rich in ancient sites; the Black Sea area having close connections with Classical Greece and the regions east of the Urals with a succession of Oriental civilisations. The ancient Silk Road, which carried textiles between China and Europe, passed through Russia’s Asian provinces while the fur trade route ran from the Kama basin in the north, down to the Volga in the south.
The early fur traders came mainly from Central Asia, and they traded silver vessels with the fur trappers of the north, with the result that much of the finest surviving Sassanian silver was found in Russia and passed by the Archaeological Commission to the Hermitage. The embossed silver dishes and ewers made in Persia during the Sassanid period (third to seventh century AD) with their lively decoration of kings and princes, wild and domestic animals, and mythical beasts, are considered among the finest historic achievements of metalworking. Along with similar silver vessels made by neighbouring peoples, some imitations and some quite original, they were traded up the fur road into north-east Russia where they were incorporated into pagan shrines and used in religious ceremonies.
The primitive local peoples sometimes used the silver dishes as body parts of their idols. Other dishes were used at feasts, since there was a rule that sacrificial meat should only be eaten from metallic vessels. In the lonely forests of the north such practices have survived right up to the present day – a tenth-century silver vessel was found in an active shrine in the 1980s. In these primitive communities, silver had no monetary value since no currency circulated. As a result, it did not get melted down as it did elsewhere.
Most of the Sassanian silver in the Hermitage was found by chance, sometimes at the sites of ancient shrines, sometimes in hoards buried by individuals for their personal use in the afterlife. In the second half of the nineteenth century Russian farmers moved into the forest areas, cutting down trees and turning the land over to cultivation. Most of the finds date from this period, though they began in the eighteenth century and continue today.
As well as founding the Archaeological Commission, Alexander II instituted the post of ‘director’ of the Hermitage Museum and appointed its first two incumbents, Stepan Gedeonov in 1863 and Prince Alexander Vasilchikov in 1879. Both had a vivid interest in art and sought out unusual opportunities for the museum.
Gedeonov had spent almost twenty years in Italy working for Russia’s Commission on Archaeological Finds in Rome, where he also had responsibility for looking after visiting students from the St Petersburg Academy of Arts. And it was in Rome, before he joined the Hermitage staff, that he pulled off his first coup on behalf of the museum – the acquisition of 760 pieces of Antique art from the Campana collection. The Papal Government had allowed him first pick from this extraordinary assemblage, despite howls of rage from the British Museum and the Louvre.
The Marchese di Cavelli, Giampietro Campana, was the intimate friend and patron of Italy’s nineteenth-century tomb robbers and formed the century’s largest collection of Classical antiquities, mostly unearthed from Etruscan tombs around the ancient city of Caere (now Cerveteri), north-west of Rome. There were 3,791 ancient Greek vases in Campana’s printed catalogue of 1857 – which omitted many more thousands of vase fragments. He went on to add paintings, sculpture, majolica and other decorative arts to his collection on a lavish scale. However, it turned out that his spending power reflected the embezzlement of deposits at the Monte di Pietà Bank of which he was director. When he was arrested and sent to a papal prison in November 1857 he owed the colossal sum of five million francs.
Campana had first offered his collection to the Russian government as far back as 1851, but the price was considered too high. After his arrest, the Papal authorities sold off the collection piecemeal to pay his debts. London’s South Kensington Museum got his collection of Renaissance works of art for a modest £5,856 (roughly 146,000 francs) in 1860. Next, Gedeonov picked out a group of choice items for which the Russian government paid some 650,000 francs. Finally, the French acquired the remainder of the collection for a total expenditure of 4.8 million francs. The French purchase reflected the direct intervention of Napoleon III who thus lavishly paid off a debt of honour. Campana’s mother-in-law had helped him escape from the Château of Ham, in Picardy, when he was imprisoned there in 1846 after a failed military coup. In addition to buying up the remainder of the collection, Napoleon III managed to negotiate Campana’s early release from prison.
In February 1861 an angry article in the Nazione, the leading Italian newspaper, revealed that the Russians had managed ‘to skim the cream off the collection’. The French purchase was finalised in May, accelerated by the fear that Gedeonov might get his hands on more. There was indeed a lot of cream – he had selected 500 vases, 193 bronzes and seventy-eight sculptures. Gedeonov also secured a group of frescoes attributed to Raphael which had been painted for the Villa Spada on the Palatine but carefully removed from the walls and transferred to canvas by the artist Antonio Zucchi in the 1850s. They are now regarded as the work of Raphael’s studio assistants but nevertheless have an honourable place in the museum’s Italian gallery. Gedeonov was so mesmerised by the frescoes that he paid no attention to the rest of Campana’s paintings, which are now in the Louvre.
The Campana vases which came to the Hermitage include examples by most of the great painters of Hellenic Greece and, combined with the vases discovered at Kerch and elsewhere in southern Russia, make up one of the finest museum collections in the world. The hydria, or water vessel, from Cumae with its three-dimensional frieze of Grecian ladies at play, was described in the 1850s as ‘the crowning jewel of Campana’s famous museum’ and is known in the Hermitage as the Regina Vasorum or ‘Queen of Vases’. The Roman sculpture also helped give the Hermitage a collection of particular distinction. Gloating over a relief sculpture of The Slaughter of the Niobids, Gedeonov wrote: ‘It is a poem in marble! Alexander II got it for 125 scudi, whereas Napoleon III would have had to pay 812,000!’ It was only one of his many bargains.
The display of the Campana collection caused a problem, however. The architect Leo von Klenze’s designs for the New Hermitage had left no room for such an influx. After serious discussions, it was decided to move the library out of the Hermitage altogether and to give the space to Campana’s antiquities. The public library on Nevsky Prospect thus received Catherine the Great’s library, including both Voltaire’s and Diderot’s books. And, since Houdon’s portrait sculpture of the seated Voltaire had been hidden in the Hermitage library to avoid the angry gaze of Nicholas I, it too followed the books down the road.
It was the Campana collection that earned Gedeonov his appointment as director of the Hermitage in 1863. He continued to work his Italian contacts to spectacular effect. In 1864 the Milanese collector Count Litta offered his collection to the Hermitage and Gedeonov bought four paintings, including the magical Leonardo Madonna and Child, now known as the Litta Madonna – behind the two figures, arched windows open on a blue Tuscan landscape echoing the tone of the Madonna’s robe. Then, in 1869, the Roman collector Count Connestabile offered his paintings to the Hermitage and Gedeonov managed to negotiate the acquisition of his Raphael Madonna on behalf of the Empress, Maria Alexandrovna. It initially hung in the Winter Palace and only came to the Hermitage at her death in 1880. After he was made director of the St Petersburg and Moscow theatres in 1867, however, Gedeonov had less time to spend on the Hermitage – the attractions of live actors and actresses were apparently more compelling than dead art. He made no more major acquisitions.
In 1879 Alexander II appointed a new director of the museum, a young diplomat called Prince Alexander Vasilchikov who was a close friend of the imperial family and had a special interest in archaeology. He was additionally appointed to the post of President of the Imperial Archaeological Commission in 1882, but there was no problem in combining these two jobs since the Commission worked closely with the museum.
Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 and succeeded by his second son Alexander III. Born in 1845, the new tsar had only become heir to the throne in 1865 on the death of his elder brother Nicholas. He inherited his brother’s fiancée, Princess Dagmar of Denmark and, despite its unromantic start, the marriage was exceptionally successful; he was the only Romanov emperor who did not take a mistress. A giant of a man – he is famous for holding up the ceiling of the imperial carriage after a train crash so that his wife and children could escape – he was frugal, hard working and conservative. He undermined all his father’s Great Reforms and reinstituted a police state which successfully suppressed all revolutionary activity – for a time.
Alexander III was a keen patron of Russian painting, which reached its first period of outstanding achievement during his reign but the pictures he bought never became part of the Hermitage collection. He planned a museum of Russian painting which was opened after his death by his son Nicholas II. Housed in the early nineteenth-century Mikhailovsky Palace, it is now known as the ‘Russian Museum’ – although up to 1917 it was called the Alexander III Museum in memory of the tsar who planned its creation.
Alexander Vasilchikov had been director of the Hermitage for two years when Alexander III came to the throne. He presented the new government with a report on the condition of the museum. ‘Twenty-five years ago,’ he wrote, ‘the Hermitage was very nearly the world’s first museum but as soon as no steps are made forward, a step is thereby made backward.’ The museum had stagnated, he said – although he acknowledged a certain revival in the 1860s when Gedeonov was pulling off his Italian coups - and blamed its condition on the lack of funds made available by the court. He asked for an acquisition fund of 50,000 roubles a year but was granted a paltry 5,000, a figure which remained unchanged up to the Revolution.
Alexander III did not accord the museum a high priority but he financed a couple of major purchases out of his personal fortune. In 1885 the cabinet secretary, Alexander Polovtsov, who was an art connoisseur, and the Russian artist, Alexander Bogolyubov, then resident in Paris, enlisted Alexander’s support for the purchase of the Basilewski collection of medieval and Renaissance art. Alexander Basilewski was a Russian then living in Paris; his collection was paid for by the Emperor personally, rather than the government, and cost 2.2 million gold roubles. A Paris auction of the 750-piece collection had already been announced and an unnamed American collector had offered almost double this figure. However, Basilewski’s patriotism led him to prefer the Hermitage and the Emperor.
‘The Basilewski collection was sold yesterday evening on the basis of a simple telegram,’ exploded the Paris daily newspaper, Le Figaro, on 29 November 1884. ‘The Russian government has paid six million francs…. What a devastating disappointment for the collectors who were already getting their ammunition together to do battle in March!…. All the intelligentsia of Europe who love the arts would have been present.’
Basilewski had started collecting in the 1850s when the fashion for medieval art, launched by Walter Scott’s novels, was beginning to spread across Europe. He decided to concentrate on forming a documentary collection of Christian art, tracing its evolution from the earliest times up to the sixteenth century. The collection included carved ivories, medieval and Renaissance metalwork – some of the sumptuous silver from the Basel cathedral treasury was bought back by the city of Basel from the Soviet government in the 1930s – Limoges enamels, Italian majolica, Venetian and German glass, medieval furniture and woodwork, arms and armour and Byzantine icons.
In every field Basilewski had bought the very best examples available. The fame of the collection in France was such that he was asked to contribute pieces for display to the Expositions Universelles of 1865 and 1867, and in 1874 he published a catalogue with the help of a curator friend at the Louvre, Alfred Darcel. The magnificent gallery in his home in the Rue Blanche was opened to the public once a week and was besieged by visitors after the sale to Russia was announced. Among them were the president of the Republic, Jules Grévy, escorting the wife of Woodrow Wilson, the American President.
The arrival of the collection in St Petersburg posed another accommodation problem but Vasilchikov resolved it in the grand manner. The State Council had recently moved out of the ground floor of the Old Hermitage to take up residence in the Mariinsky Palace. He persuaded the Emperor that the Tsarskoe Selo Arsenal, which, under Nicholas I, had acquired a few medieval works of art, and the Basilewski collection, should be combined to create a new display of medieval and Renaissance art filling the former council rooms. This occupied twenty rooms on the ground floor of the Old Hermitage and was dressed up in theatrical manner – there were fully armed knights on horseback and on foot, wall displays of armour, cases densely packed with ivories and bronzes. ‘The decorative element was developed to such a degree that it could produce a certain giddiness in the viewer,’ commented Alfred Kube, a later keeper of the collection. Some Russian works of art were also transferred from the Antiquities department. The exhibition was changed after the Revolution.
The following year Vasilchikov again enlisted Alexander Ill’s support, this time for the purchase of Moscow’s Golitsyn Museum en bloc for 800,000 roubles – roughly one third of the price paid for Basilewski’s collection. It comprised the collection of paintings formed in the eighteenth century by Princes A. M. and D. M. Golitsyn through purchases in Vienna and Paris – including the wonderful early Venetian Annunciation by Cima da Conegliano – and a superb library. Most of the books went to the St Petersburg Public Library and, as a quid pro quo, Vasilchikov negotiated the return of Houdon’s statue of the seated Voltaire. Nicholas I having joined his fathers, it went back on display at the Hermitage.
The death of Alexander III, on 20 October 1894, from a rare kidney disease, had not been expected. His son Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia, was twenty-six when he ascended the throne. Only a year before, the Finance Minister, Count Sergey Witte, had suggested to Alexander that Nicholas might chair the Committee for Constructing the Trans-Siberian Railway. ‘Have you ever tried to discuss anything of consequence with him?’, Alexander had asked and, when Witte admitted he had not, explained that Nicholas was still an ‘absolute’ child. ‘His judgements are still truly childish. How could he be chairman of a committee?’, his father enquired.
Within a year he was not only a chairman but an emperor. At his side stood a strong-minded but intellectually blinkered woman, his young wife Alexandra, whose influence over her doting husband was to prove disastrous. Born Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter became engaged to Nicholas in April 1894. ‘I cried like a child and she did too,’ Nicholas wrote to his mother. ‘But her expression changed,’ he added. ‘Her face was lit up by a quiet content.’ They were married quietly in the large church of the Winter Palace, surrounded by the Baroque splendour designed by Rastrelli, a week after Nicholas’s father’s death and were the last Romanov rulers of Russia.
The young couple’s tragedy stemmed fundamentally from their piety. Nicholas believed, very literally, that a tsar was anointed by God and was thus a divinely inspired source of wisdom and order. In 1900, after celebrating Easter in the Kremlin cathedrals, he wrote to his mother: ‘I never knew I could be in such a state of religious ecstasy as I have experienced this Lent…. Everything here makes for prayer and spiritual peace.’ His antagonism to democratic principles and his repeated rejection of his advisers’ suggestions stemmed from a belief that he was the chosen instrument of God’s will; an inner voice told him what to do.
Alexandra, who had converted to Russian Orthodoxy from the Lutheran church at the time of her marriage, shared his piety. After bearing four daughters she gave birth to a precious son, Aleksey, in 1904, who turned out to have haemophilia. At the slightest scratch, he bled and the bleeding would not stop. Aleksey’s health became Alexandra’s overriding preoccupation. When a wild, holy man from Siberian peasant stock, Grigory Rasputin, proved able to heal Aleksey’s bleeding, Alexandra welcomed him into her family circle and listened obediently to his every pronouncement. Meanwhile Rasputin’s debauchery – he had an insatiable sexual appetite – outraged the capital.
When Nicholas took over command of the army at the outbreak of war in 1914, on God’s instructions and to the despair of his advisers and allies, he left Alexandra to rule the country in his place, which she did, leaning heavily on Rasputin’s advice. In 1916 Rasputin was assassinated by a group of extreme conservatives who believed that in this way they were saving the monarchy from itself.
In all the events of his reign Nicholas saw only the workings of God’s will – even in the Revolution of 1905 which was, as it were, a trial run for 1917, and the disastrous Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5 whose incompetent handling gave a foretaste of the disasters of World War I. Nicholas astonished his foreign minister by his calm reception of the report of a naval mutiny at the Kronstadt Fortress in 1905, telling him: ‘If you find me so little troubled, it is because I have the firm and absolute faith that the destiny of Russia, my own fate and that of my family are in the hands of Almighty God, who has placed me where I am. Whatever may happen, I shall bow to his will.’
A Duma, or elected parliament, was forced on Nicholas after the 1905 Revolution but he quickly moved to limit its powers. In 1917 he attempted to close it down altogether but the Duma instead forced him to abdicate and formed a Provisional Government. Six months later, in the second revolution of the year, the Bolsheviks came to power. The Provisional Government had kept Nicholas and his family under arrest at Tsarskoe Selo. The Bolsheviks now moved them first to Tobolsk, then to Ekaterinburg in the Urals, where they were shot in the cellar of the Ipat’ev House on 17 July 1918. Attempts were made to destroy the bodies, which, together with an assortment of jewels sewn into the ladies’ corsets, were thrown in a mineshaft. A whole industry rapidly grew up to sift the evidence of how the Romanovs perished.
During his reign, Nicholas and his government were keenly criticised by connoisseurs for not taking more interest in the Hermitage Museum. Its displays were hardly changed; it was given no money for new acquisitions; it was staffed by a small group of scholarly courtiers, which meant that young art historians could not gain employment. However, the museum has subsequently benefited from some of the schemes which did attract Nicholas’s patronage. A striking example is provided by the treasures recovered in 1908–9 from excavations of the lost city of Khara Khoto on the Edsin-Gol river delta, near the border between China and the Mongolian People’s Republic, by the explorer Petr Kozlov – 3,500 works of art, all dating from before 1387. They were transferred to the Hermitage from the Ethographical Department of the Russian Museum in 1933 when the curator Iosif Orbeli was building up the new Oriental Department.
The turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a great era for explorers and Kozlov gained worldwide recognition for his work, receiving the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, the Gold Medal of the Italian Geographical Society and the Chikhachev prize of the French Academy of Sciences, among other honours. His major achievement lay in his comprehensive study of Central Asia, its peoples, its history and its natural phenomena Petr Kozlov botanical and zoological museums gained from his expeditions as well as the Hermitage. In 1905 Nicholas II dispatched him to Urga to meet the Dalai Lama. They got on particularly well and the expedition’s artist made sketches of the Dalai Lama which are now in the Hermitage. Kozlov met the Dalai Lama again in Xining in 1908, after the discovery of Khara Khoto, which fascinated the Dalai Lama so much that he invited Kozlov to come to Lhasa and explore Tibet – an invitation he was never able to take up.
The existence of the ruins of Khara Khoto had first been mentioned to the Russian explorer Grigory Potanin in 1886 by a local Torgut tribesman and fired the imagination of Kozlov when he heard of it, but the Torguts subsequently tried to conceal its location from the Russians. The city had been recorded by Chinese geographers in the fifth century BC and later became a flourishing oasis on the Silk Road connecting Europe with China. It was abandoned after its river dried up, turning the whole area into desert, sometime after 1400. Kozlov would probably never have found it if a Mongolian prince had not provided him with a guide in order to spite the Torguts. The ruins lay a short distance from a dry river bed. There were mosques and stupas outside the town walls, then a huge rectangular open space covered with the remnants of buildings, piles of rubbish and the foundations of temples. Kozlov found fragments of manuscripts, paintings, beads and clay figures, which he despatched to St Petersburg for study in March 1908.
It took almost ninth months to get a reply, though the arrival of Kozlov’s parcels in St Petersburg had caused a sensation. Friends and colleagues from the Imperial Geographical Society explained to him the enormous academic significance of his finds, how they were going to contribute to an understanding of Tangut culture, about which little or nothing was hitherto known, and the unique nature of the documents he had found written in Tangut script – he had also found manuscripts in Chinese and Persian with which to compare them. It was imperative that he return to Khara Khoto immediately.
Kozlov arrived back in May 1909 and his team opened a stupa some 300 yards outside the city wall which ‘yielded a truly prodigious treasure’, to use the words of Hermitage curator Kira Samosyuk. There were manuscripts, books, scrolls, miniature stupas, bronze and wooden statues all jumbled together. ‘I shall never forget those blissful moments,’ Kozlov wrote, ‘as I shall equally never forget, in particular, the powerful impression made on myself and my companions by two Chinese icons on a muslin-like material. As we unrolled them, we were enthralled to see magnificent seated figures, bathed in a soft pale blue and pink radiance. From these sacred Buddhist relics there emanated something living, something expressive, something unalloyed; we simply could not take our eyes off them.’
The stupa was the burial chamber of a member of the Tangut imperial family. A female skull was found and the most likely guess is that this was the burial of Empress Lo, the Chinese-born widow of the Tangut Emperor Ren-zong who died in 1193. As a result of this extraordinary find, the Hermitage has 200 paintings on silk, canvas, paper and wood, more than half of them complete, as well as drawings, seventy sculptures in clay, wood and bronze, textiles, paper banknotes and coins and literally thousands of pottery and porcelain fragments.
On his return Kozlov was promoted to the rank of Colonel and invited by Nicholas II to give a lecture on Khara Khoto to the imperial family and an audience of specially invited guests at Tsarskoe Selo. The lecture was accompanied by lantern slides.
While the art works from Khara Khoto went to the Russian Museum – and on to the Hermitage – the books and manuscripts were given to the Asiatic Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences which had been run since 1900 by Sergey Oldenburg, the greatest Orientalist of his time. It was Oldenburg, a specialist on Buddhism, who had recognised the importance of the first documents and artefacts that Kozlov had sent back from Khara Khoto in 1908. He ran several expeditions himself – his 1914–15 expedition to the ancient monastery outside the Chinese city of Dunhuang, the so-called ‘Cave of a Thousand Buddhas’, has provided the Hermitage with a group of wall paintings, sculpture and votive banners which, although smaller than the Dunhuang collections at the British Museum and Musée Guimet in Paris, are of comparable importance to the study of Buddhist art.
Oldenburg is a pivotal link between the old regime and the new. He was a friend of Lenin and became the most important figure in the Russian world of scholarship after the Revolution. He was elected to the governing Council of the Hermitage Museum in 1918, helped launch the new Oriental Department in the early 1920s and fought tirelessly to prevent the sale of the museum’s treasures in 1928–30. He will make many appearances in later chapters and deserves to be properly introduced.
Sergey Oldenburg was born in 1863 and was a university student in St Petersburg in the early 1880s, the period of most extreme police censorship following Alexander II’s assassination. Large gatherings of students were forbidden by law; if they did get together for any purpose, such as a literary society or for a drink, their names were taken – even if they had only assembled to read essays to each other. Oldenburg was often in trouble over meetings with students and colleagues, and continued to battle for a relaxation of the regulations after he became a professor in the Oriental Faculty at St Petersburg university in 1897. He finally resigned from the university in 1899, considering it impossible to work there given the repressive atmosphere. His Orientalist friends got him the job of running the Asiatic Museum of the Academy of Sciences.
In the following years he climbed to the very top of his profession, always seeking to reform and improve the world around him. He became the permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences in 1904, an Academician in 1908 and a member of the State Council in 1912. At the time of the Revolution he was a left-wing member of the Kadet party and served, for six months, as the Provisional Government’s Minister of Education. He spent seventeen days in prison in 1919 when the Bolsheviks were busy stamping the Kadet party out of existence.
He had been a friend of Lenin’s brother, Alexander Ulyanov, before his execution in 1885 for plotting an attempted assassination of the tsar Alexander III, and first met Lenin himself in 1891. When the Bolsheviks considered closing the Academy of Sciences in 1919, it was Oldenburg’s appeal to Lenin that saved it. For a decade he was the most powerful figure in the Soviet academic world; but, under Stalin, his star was eclipsed. In 1929 he was summarily sacked from the Academy of Sciences. It was a time when the secret police arrested a swathe of Academicians and Oldenburg’s name was on their list but, for some reason, struck through with a red pencil. He died a natural death in 1934. As will be seen, Oldenburg’s career closely echoes the fate of scholarship, in general, in the turbulent years before and after the Revolution.