In 1917 the Russian calendar was thirteen days behind the rest of Europe. On Lenin’s instructions February 1918 was reduced to fifteen days in order to catch up. So the ‘February Revolution’ of 1917 in fact took place in March. The Hermitage was closed early in the month because of shooting in the streets and the keepers organised a rota so that one of them should always spend the night in the museum. When required, he could call in Count Dmitry Tolstoy, the director, at short notice since the latter had an apartment in the Small Hermitage, just below the Pavilion Room, looking out over the river.

On Wednesday 14 March, the day before the Emperor finally abdicated, it was the turn of Yakov Smirnov to keep watch from a small room leading off the vestibule, used by the Hofführer, or museum manager, during the day. Smirnov was a keeper in the Medieval Department, a professor at the university, author of a classic work on Oriental silver and an authority on the relations between the Sassanian Empire in Persia and the ancient Greeks. Tolstoy records in his memoirs that he was impulsive, obstinate and loved to criticise everyone, including himself, which on this occasion nearly proved his undoing. As Tolstoy tells it:

In a move which foreshadowed the future balance of power in the museum, the uneducated gallery guards, or ‘attendants’, who had gathered to watch this brawl now advised Tolstoy and Smirnov to leave the situation in their hands. They ‘persuaded us to leave them alone to talk to the soldiers, stating that the latter would be more likely to listen to their “brothers”, and this indeed succeeded. The soldiers began to drift away, at first leaving two guards – who quite soon, however, preferred to leave themselves.’

By this time, virtually every barracks in the city had mutinied and the common soldiers were running their own affairs in defiance of their officers, with a minimum of direction from two new organs of government which had come into existence forty-eight hours before. The Revolution, it should be remembered, was initially an undirected popular movement. Nicholas II and his personally appointed ministers had been sending thousands of Russian citizens to their death in a war with Germany that was extravagantly mishandled. Neither the soldiers themselves, nor their relations and friends – Russia’s workers and peasants – could tolerate the waste of so many Russian lives.

Crowds of demonstrators made up of industrial workers, their families and non-commissioned soldiers began to surge through the streets of St Petersburg in the early days of March. The police, fearing violence, mounted machine guns on the roofs of strategic buildings and on Sunday 11 March they began to fire on the crowds. A particularly vivid description of the horror that ensued has been left by a British diplomat, Bertie Stopford, who was staying at the Hotel Europe in Mikhailovskaya Street, just off Nevsky Prospect, the main artery of the city. He was changing for dinner when he heard a sound he ‘knew but couldn’t recall’.

I opened my window wide and realised that it was the chatter of a machine-gun; then I saw an indescribable sight – all the well dressed Nevsky crowd running for their lives down the Mikhailovskaya Street, and a stampede of motor cars and sledges – to escape from the machine-guns which never stopped firing. I saw a well-dressed lady run over by an automobile, a sledge turn over and the driver thrown in the air and killed. The poorer looking people crouched against the walls; many others, principally men, lay flat in the snow. Lots of children were trampled on, and people knocked down by the sledges or the rush of the crowd.

Similar scenes were repeated all over the city and on Monday 12 March the crowds fought back. They set fire to police stations and prisons, releasing thousands of political prisoners, as well as ordinary malefactors. By around midnight on 12 March, a new political order was born. The setting was the Tauride Palace, the imposing Neoclassical home built by Catherine the Great’s favourite, Prince Grigory Potemkin, which was currently used as the seat of the elected parliament, or Duma.

Since its inauguration in April 1906, the Duma had become the chief critic of imperial policy and earlier on the 12th the Emperor issued a decree dissolving it, which was duly ignored. Just before midnight, a parliamentary committee, composed of representatives from all parties, decided to assume power as a Provisional Government to rule Russia until democratic elections could be organised. The palace was full of a surging crowd of workers and soldiers and at the other end of it an even more momentous meeting was taking place. Representatives of the main workers’ organisation, who had been released from the Kresty Prison earlier in the day, had met to organise the formation of the Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. The Russian word for ‘council’ is ‘soviet’ and it was in the name of this soviet in particular that the Bolsheviks were to seize power six months later, thus laying the foundations of the future Soviet Union.

At this stage, neither the Hermitage Museum nor the Winter Palace was a particular focus of attention for revolutionaries. The imperial family had not used the Winter Palace for a few years, preferring to live in less formal surroundings at the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. The Empress Alexandra, however, had helped organise a hospital in the Winter Palace to accommodate the vast influx of wounded soldiers sent home from the front. It occupied the first-floor rooms overlooking the Neva and a section of the second floor. ‘All was beds, screens and tables with medicines,’ according to an account left by Alexandre Benois who saw it in 1916, ‘and between them the pitiful shadows in their hospital clothes wandered silently. Many of them lay under their grey blankets attended by snow white nurses in caps. Everything was very dimly lit … by a few bulbs in the huge chandeliers, or by night lights.’

It is characteristic of the unreality reigning in imperial circles that General Volkov, head of His Imperial Majesty’s Cabinet (or private office) should have invited Benois to look over the Winter Palace in 1916 – Benois had wanted to do this for many years. Volkov explained to him that he wanted to raise the artistic standard of the Winter Palace, something which, he said, no one had had time to attend to since the fire of 1837! It is incredible to conceive of Volkov deciding to get down to this on the eve of revolution and in the middle of a devastating war.

Benois was not impressed by the aesthetics of the palace. Moving on from the hospital, ‘no more joyful impression was created by the personal rooms of His and Her Majesties. These are dominated by an outstanding lack of taste.’ The rooms were overloaded with furniture, he said, evidence of the poor guidance their favourite architect, Robert Friedrich Meltzer, had given them. He described it as mainly ‘heavy furniture’, not the Art Nouveau which the imperial couple favoured at the Alexander Palace:

I thought that we could save the impression of the palace by giving back the heavy rooms along Palace Square their former Rastrelli look. However, we should leave the old study of Nicholas I in the entresol looking over the Admiralty untouched. The furniture is severe but not without taste…. Also of great historical significance is the study of Alexander II on the second floor. The decoration of the walls here has the character of the Catherine era, for it was also the study of Catherine’s grandson Alexander Pavlovich.

Benois records that ‘this all survived when I made a similar trip round the Palace in March 1917 but much was destroyed after the Bolshevik uprising when the soldiers had the free run of the palace for three days’.

It is important to remember that there were two revolutions in St Petersburg in 1917. First came what the Soviets liked to call the ‘bourgeois revolution’ in March and then, as the Provisional Government proved unable to control the newly enfranchised workers, soldiers and sailors, Lenin’s ‘October Revolution’ which, of course, took place in November. The second posed a much greater threat to the museum complex since the Provisional Government had by then established its headquarters in the Winter Palace and the Bolsheviks were required to ‘storm’ it.

In Benois’s estimation, however, the destruction on that occasion was no great loss to posterity. His disparaging view of imperial taste is echoed by a twenty-two-year-old art historian, Larisa Reisner, who worked as secretary to the Bolshevik Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky – Tolstoy recalls that the Bolsheviks’ cultural supremo had an eye for a pretty girl. She inspected the Winter Palace in November 1917 and left a vivid account:

There, where the Tsar lived for the last fifty years, there is a very difficult and unpleasant feeling. Some tasteless watercolours, portraits done God knows when and by whom, the modern Art Nouveau style for furniture – it is painful to see such things in this accommodation built for demi-gods. What sideboards and desks and wardrobes – Oh my God! The taste of a trader on the stock exchange – the kind who has five good rooms with soft furniture and a photograph album of pictures of his parents. How you want to gather it all together, all this vulgar human rubbish and throw it into the royal stove and burn it to the glory and beauty of art – setting fire to it with a wonderful old Florentine candelabra.

The Provisional Government was the offspring of the duly elected Duma and took power after the Emperor abdicated. It was all, more or less, within the framework of the law, and the Court Ministry – which included the Hermitage – had little difficulty in working with it. On 17 March the chief clerk of the Hermitage administration came to see Tolstoy to tell him that ‘all institutions were sending the Duma papers recognising the new government and the attendants were worried that we hadn’t done it. So we drew up a declaration and I signed it and this was given to an attendant who flagged down a car on Millionaya and took it to the Duma.’

In the first few days after the coup, there was a universal sense of a heavy yoke having been lifted from society and an utopia opening ahead. The educated bourgeoisie were taking over from the tsar’s lieutenants in every sphere and the art lovers of the capital saw their first duty as ensuring the protection of the nation’s artistic heritage in the aftermath of revolution. Benois’s diary calls 17 March ‘an outstanding day in my personal life’. He confided to the diary that ‘much of what can now be done in the special field of the arts can be done only with my close involvement, if not with me in charge. So I have taken up the standard.’

Maxim Gorky, the most famous writer in Russia, felt the same way. He had a natural affinity with the oppressed who were now throwing off the tsarist yoke. He had been brought up in abject poverty by his grandfather, a dyer, and achieved international fame in the early years of the century with novels and plays which presented an authentic picture of working-class life – the first time this had been attempted in literature. His famous play, The Lower Depths, is still performed, though his novels have become somewhat dated. He was naturally in favour of revolution and was to play a very active role in the cultural sphere in the early days of Bolshevik rule.

On 17 March Gorky organised a meeting for artists ‘to come together to discuss their common cause’, Benois recalled, ‘and – what amazing speed and attention to detail – to put forward a candidate for Minister of the Arts. Everyone agreed that Diaghilev should be the Minister.’ Benois went round to Gorky’s early and they worked out a basic plan before the others arrived, which was lucky since ‘everyone who had been invited came, but so did those who hadn’t been invited and also those whom nobody knew at all. Altogether there were over forty people in Alexey Maximovich’s small parlour which was full to bursting.’ (Alexey Maximovich Peshkov was Gorky’s real name, though he is better known under his writer’s pseudonym.)

A delegation took their plans for protecting artistic treasures to the Duma in the Tauride Palace, where it was duly signed by the new prime minister, Prince Georgy Lvov. Indeed he gave them extra powers they had not asked for, ‘the right to form a special militia to protect art and museums and the right to give orders necessary for this end’. Out of this initiative was born the Council for the Protection of Cultural Treasures of the Provisional Government, under the direction of the Commissar of the former Imperial Court, one Fedor Golovin, who was previously one of the Duma’s leading deputies. Everyone who mattered in Russian cultural life was initially a member of this Council, including Benois, Count Tolstoy, the archaeologist Mikhail Rostovtsev, the artist and art historian Igor Grabar, and Count Valentin Zubov who founded St Petersburg’s first Institute of Art History. Benois was its chief activist in St Petersburg and Grabar in Moscow. It was subsequently taken over by the Bolsheviks and renamed the Collegium for the Preservation of Monuments and Museum Affairs.

Protection was necessary because the old palaces now began to be turned over to new uses. The suite of rooms overlooking the river in Velten’s Old Hermitage was taken over by the so-called Extraordinary Investigating Commission on the Former Imperial Ministers and Employees – the very rooms where Nicholas I had interrogated the Decembrists. Their ghosts must have watched with a wan smile as the officers of the regime they had sought to overturn a hundred years before were sternly interrogated by the revolutionaries. Catherine the Great had built these rooms to display her pictures, but the pictures had been removed to the New Hermitage in the 1850s and the rooms were subsequently used to accommodate visitors, becoming known as the ‘Seventh Spare Part’. A request from the museum staff that they should be turned back into galleries had recently been turned down on the grounds that the Preobrazhensky Guards needed to walk through them on the way from their barracks to guard duty in the Winter Palace.

The government’s failure to bring the war to a rapid and just conclusion led to new discontent among the workers and soldiers who had delivered power into its hands. Meanwhile the Germans, with exceptional perspicacity, had provided a special sealed train to take Lenin and his fellow revolutionaries from their exile in Switzerland to St Petersburg – they were not allowed out of the train on German territory. Lenin arrived on 16 April and began to fan the flames of discontent. He offered the people, in the name of his Bolshevik party, an ‘immediate proposal of a democratic peace, the abolition of the landlords’ ownership of land, workers’ control over production and the creation of a Soviet Government’.

In the early days of July an attempted Bolshevik coup led by Trotsky and Lenin nearly succeeded, the soldiers in several barracks, including the Peter and Paul Fortress, went over to their side and there was rioting in the streets. After the suppression of the attempted coup, Alexander Kerensky, a brilliant young lawyer and one of the original leaders of the Workers and Soldiers Soviet, became prime minister – he had been a highly influential justice minister in the earlier government.

It was Kerensky who decided to turn the Winter Palace into the seat of government. Its offices occupied the rooms on the first floor where the imperial family had previously lived, starting with the Malachite Room and continuing down the western side of the palace overlooking the garden and the Admiralty. Kerensky turned the library into his office and Alexander Ill’s study, on the second floor, into his bedroom. The chancellery moved into the first-floor rooms overlooking the courtyard, where the museum now has a memorial display of Peter the Great’s lathes and the items he made with them. Kerensky’s secretary and other support staff moved into the rooms formerly used by the ladies-in-waiting on the second floor.

In such troubled times the government required a military guard and the state rooms on the first floor were turned into their barracks. As the situation worsened, more and more loyal soldiers were recruited to guard the palace, prominent among them the so-called yunkers, or students from the military academy – it was hard to find older soldiers who had not switched their loyalty to the Bolsheviks. The soldiers gradually extended their territory until beds and straw mattresses filled the Gold Drawing Room on the corner of Palace Square, the Raspberry Drawing Room and the White Hall.

According to Alfred Knox, the military attaché at the British embassy, writing on the eve of the October Revolution, ‘the garrison of the Palace originally consisted of about 2,000 all told, including detachments from yunker and ensign schools, three squadrons of Cossacks, a company of volunteers and a company from the Women’s Battalion. It had six guns and one armoured car.’

The influx of government officials and soldiers made the protection of palace treasures an immediate priority. In July, just before the move, a new commission known as the Artistic Historical Commission began work on an inventory of the art treasures in the imperial palaces. It was headed by the former Winter Palace Hofmeister (the executive manager of the palace) Vasily Vereshchagin who was also an art historian and had collaborated on the production of the magazine Starye Gody. The Commission’s report for 7 August lists the contents of the main rooms of the Winter Palace but protests that their work has been ruined by the soldiers moving in, with wet towels hanging up on marble statues and straw on the parquet floors.

Meanwhile Tolstoy and his staff were worrying about the advance of the Germans – who occupied Riga on 2 September – and the threat they posed to the Hermitage treasures. A particular focus of their anxiety was the group of paintings which Alexander I had bought from the heirs of the Empress Josephine in 1814 and which she, in turn, had received as the spoils of war from the collection of the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel. Tolstoy and his associates feared that the Landgrave’s descendants would reclaim the paintings – a Descent from the Cross by Rembrandt, four Claude Lorrains, a Holy Family by Andrea del Sarto and many other major masterpieces. Their fears were, in fact, shown to be justified after the Bolshevik Revolution, when the Germans inserted a clause claiming the paintings in the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. James Schmidt, keeper of the picture gallery, penned a well-argued memorandum refuting the claim for Trotsky, who handled the peace negotiations; the pictures and the memorandum are still in the Hermitage.

At the keepers’ meeting of 9 September it was decided to recommend evacuation of the museum’s art treasures to Moscow. Tolstoy passed on the decision to Fedor Golovin, the Commissar in charge of the former Ministry of the Imperial Court, and on 31 August money was made available to begin packing. Carpenters were sent over from the Winter Palace to make crates — they ended up making 833 of them. Tolstoy writes:

With terror I asked myself – when and in what state will these precious things again see the light of day? The Hermitage was living in a feverish, difficult time; it seemed as though we were caught in a nightmare, or burying someone very near and dear. The whole of the curatorial staff were working very intensely, our scholars themselves wrapping up and packing the objects they were responsible for…. Igor Grabar and other artistic figures came up from Moscow to talk to us about where they should put the objects being taken from St Petersburg; we decided on the Armoury, the Great Kremlin Palace, the History Museum and the Museum of Alexander III [today’s Pushkin Museum was then known as the Museum of Alexander III].

The first trainload of crates left for Moscow on the night of 29–30 September. It had taken all day to load, with careful lists being double-checked at the station to ensure that nothing had gone missing. Yakov Smirnov, the expert on Sassanian silver, accompanied the train to Moscow and reported back that 320 crates had been stored in the Great Kremlin Palace, 227 in the Armoury and sixty-seven in the History Museum. In the second train, which left on 19–20 October, the Hermitage was only allowed five carriages since a large amount of material was being sent from the Winter Palace, including the finest items from the imperial wine cellar, disguised as archives – 100-year-old cognac, Madeira and Hungarian wines. The entrancing smell which broken bottles spread in the Kremlin Palace later led to repeated breakins and put the Hermitage treasures in considerable danger. This time, the medieval works of art and the coin collection were stored in the Armoury while Houdon’s life-size statue of the seated Voltaire – dismissed by Nicholas I as ‘that old monkey’ – was set up in the vestibule of the Annunciation Entrance of the Great Kremlin Palace.

The keepers continued packing but the third train was delayed for too long and had to be scrapped. It was supposed to leave on 7–8 November, the momentous twenty-four hours which saw the storming of the Winter Palace and the seizure of power by the Bolshevik revolutionaries. The timing of the coup was carefully planned by Lenin and Trotsky. The Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets was due to open on 7 November; this was an assembly of delegates from all over Russia who would have the right to dissolve the Provisional Government and hand over power – but the less extreme parties, the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries, were going to be in the majority. The Bolsheviks therefore seized power in the name of the Petrograd Workers’ and Soldiers’ Soviet a matter of hours before the opening of the Congress.

In August the Soviet had moved its headquarters from the Tauride Palace to the Smolny Institute, a handsome yellow and white building constructed in 1806–8 to house a boarding school for young noblewomen. The Congress assembled in the Lecture Hall but the 5 p.m. opening was delayed while the Bolsheviks seized power. By noon their supporters had surrounded the Winter Palace where the Provisional Government was meeting, though Kerensky had slipped out in the course of the morning to try and get reinforcements from front-line troops. The Bolsheviks’ Military Revolutionary Committee demanded the unconditional surrender of the palace and when they received no answer, in the words of Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador:

The Congress belatedly opened its proceedings at around 10.40 p.m. but shortly afterwards ‘a new sound made itself heard, deeper than the tumult of the crowd, persistent, disquieting – the dull shock of guns’, as the American journalist John Reed reported. There were outraged protests from Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries at the unsanctioned use of force and most of the delegates of these two parties walked out of the Congress. At 5 a.m. the rump of the delegates, now mainly Bolsheviks, approved a manifesto drafted by Lenin on the transfer of power. ‘The Provisional Government is deposed,’ he wrote. ‘State power has passed into the hands of the organ of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, the Military Revolutionary Committee, which stands at the head of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison.’ Meanwhile at the Winter Palace ‘the garrison had dwindled owing to desertions’ according to Alfred Knox.

No one had any stomach for fighting; and some of the ensigns even borrowed great coats of soldier pattern from the women to enable them to escape unobserved.

The greater part of the yunkers of the Mikhail Artillery School returned to their school, taking with them four out of their six guns. Then the Cossacks left, declaring themselves opposed to bloodshed! At 10 p.m. a large part of the ensigns left, leaving few defenders except the ensigns of the Engineering School and the company of women….

The defence was unorganised and only three of the many entrances were guarded. Parties of the attackers penetrated by side entrances in search of loot. At first these parties were small and were disarmed by the garrison, but they were succeeded by larger bands of sailors and of the Pavlovsky Regiment, in addition to armed workmen, and these turned the tables by disarming the garrison. This was, however, carried out, as an officer of the garrison afterwards stated, ‘in a domestic manner’, with little bloodshed. The garrison fired little and is said to have only lost three yunkers wounded…. At 2.30 a.m. on the 8th the Palace was ‘taken’.

Count Tolstoy lived through these events in the relative seclusion of the Hermitage Museum. At that time the museum was quite separate from the Winter Palace, with only one interconnecting door at the south end of the Small Hermitage. ‘Things didn’t look too good on the morning of the 7th’, according to Tolstoy’s memoirs:

At first the Neva bridges were up to prevent the Bolsheviks and soldiers reaching the palaces and government buildings. But they were soon put down and not allowed up again from which we understood that things were not going too well for the Provisional Government. Once again lorries filled with workers and soldiers flew to and fro along the embankment, as they had in the first days of the revolution.

He was in his apartment in the Small Hermitage at 5 p.m. when he received a phone call from the museum to say that the revolutionary headquarters had rung and they were sending new guards to replace the yunkers then in charge of the museum.

I summoned the senior soldier on watch and asked him what we were supposed to do. He said he was going to see the head of the watch in the Winter Palace and having got instructions would come back. On his return he told me that the yunkers wouldn’t leave their posts. They would not give up the watch to anyone else and would defend to the last the institution they had been asked to protect.

A keeper called Struve was supposed to be on night duty but he had not arrived and his wife rang up worried because of the shooting in the streets. Soon afterwards, Struve himself phoned. He was on his way but there had been a lot of rifle firing. I told him to return home and I would spend the night myself in the Hofführer’s chair.

Around 9 p.m. there was a loud knock on the door and about 30 members of the Preobrazhensky Guard came in with a low ranking officer. They demanded that the yunkers hand over their weapons and said that they would replace them. There was a lively discussion. I didn’t manage to hear everything as it was so noisy. In the end the old watch gave in and had its weapons removed. The senior yunker came to me and apologised and explained that they could not defend the Hermitage against this larger group of soldiers. I confessed that I thought a peaceful conclusion was the best…. The young lads were pleased and hoped to go back peacefully to their college or homes but they were taken as prisoners of war to the Pavlovsk Barracks and who knows what happened to them. We only know that a large number of yunkers died that night.

The new guards moved heavy furniture, boxes and sofas to barricade the entrance to the Hermitage and all the passages between the Hermitage and the Winter Palace. They established military posts at the entrance and in all the galleries overlooking Millionaya Street or the Winter Canal – each guard had to take charge of several rooms. Tolstoy spent the night in the Hofführer’s office where he got a little sleep despite his worries and ‘the sound of the canons of the Aurora shooting at the Palace’. But at 6 a.m. he was woken by an attendant who had gone out and seen the lights on in his apartment.

I had ordered that the lights should never be put on without closing the curtains so as not to attract attention. After several unsuccessful attempts to get through on the phone, I managed to speak to a terrified servant who said that they were robbing my flat. The mob had broken into the flat through the Romanov Gallery and the internal staircase from the Winter Palace. They had broken cupboards, commodes, chests and tables and since 6 a.m. they had been carrying out as much as they could.

One of the night watch said he would go to my flat and, if possible, take me there with two of my relatives from Petrograd Side who had arrived to find out what was happening to me. He soon returned with two passes from the new commandant of the Palace and explained with great concern that he had taken my gramophone with its horn away from a sailor in the door of my flat. He was very worried about the theft of an item which was clearly of great interest to him. We set off along the embankment to my flat where we found only one sailor – he was wandering around the rooms waving an antique sabre he had requisitioned. The state of the flat was terrible, the furniture overturned and mess everywhere … straw, papers, the cupboards and commodes were all open…. In places there were piles of dirty rags, the clothes and shoes that the thieves had thrown off, replacing them with clothes from our cupboards.

Revolution was clearly an unnerving business. Like Tolstoy, most of the keepers spent the night when the Winter Palace was stormed in the museum, partly because it was too dangerous to go home and partly out of loyalty to its treasures. On the preceding morning they had been summoned to a meeting in the Raphael Loggia at 11 a.m. to plan that night’s evacuation of the collection – which, of course, never took place. Tolstoy himself did not turn up for the meeting as he had decided to try to see the British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, and ask for his help; he took his deputy, Eduard Lenz, with him but the ambassador would not see them – jealously guarding his neutrality.

The rest of the keepers waited all day in the Raphael Loggia from whose windows they could see the Preobrazhensky Guards in their barracks on the other side of the Winter Canal, rushing to and fro and shouting out of the windows to revolutionaries in the street. At lunchtime, the keeper of objets de vertu, Sergey Troinitsky left them, since he was staying down the street with Prince Lobanov-Rostovsky. He returned in a state of extreme agitation to say that the anti-government forces had almost completely taken over Palace Square and were trying to seize the palace itself. He brought with him a proclamation he had picked up in the street with an alarming message:

Pogrom organisers may try to create confusion and bloodshed on the streets of Petrograd. The Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies takes responsibility for the maintenance of revolutionary order against counter-revolutionary and pogrom attacks. The Petrograd garrison will not allow any violence or disturbances. We call on the population to detain hooligans and Black Hundred agitators and deliver them to the commissars of the Soviet in the nearest military barracks. At the first attempt of dark elements to create disturbances, looting, knife attacks, or shooting on the streets of Petrograd, the criminals shall be wiped off the face of the earth. Citizens! We call on you to remain totally calm and keep control of yourselves. Order and the revolution are in strong hands.

As it began to get dark, the keepers heard machine-gun fire down the street. Tolstoy and Lenz still had not returned and Yakov Smirnov, the next most senior, announced that he was taking charge. He said that everyone who wanted to should go home but he himself intended to spend the night in the museum. Most of the other keepers decided to do the same, including Troinitsky, James Schmidt from the picture department, and Oskar Waldhauer, keeper of Classical antiquities. They encountered the new guards and helped them barricade the museum, then retired to the Italian picture gallery where they moved the velvet chairs into a semicircle and sat and dozed in the dark. In the early hours of the morning one of the guards looked in to tell them that the Winter Palace had been taken.

The treasures of the Hermitage thus came through the Revolution virtually unscathed, some stored in Moscow and the rest still in place in St Petersburg. The same could not be said of the works of art in the Winter Palace – which was to be handed over to the museum in stages over the following decades. In his classic account of the Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World, John Reed, the American journalist, gives a highly evocative account of the Winter Palace’s fate – though it should be born in mind that Reed was seeing the event through the rose-tinted spectacles of a Bolshevik sympathiser:

Carried along by the eager wave of men we were swept into the right-hand entrance, opening into a great bare vaulted room, the cellar of the east wing, from which issued a maze of corridors and staircases. A number of huge packing cases stood about, and upon these the Red Guards and soldiers fell furiously, battering them open with the butts of their rifles, and pulling out carpets, curtains, linen, porcelain, plates, glassware…. One man went strutting around with a bronze clock perched on his shoulder; another found a plume of ostrich feathers, which he stuck in his hat. The looting was just beginning when somebody cried, ‘Comrades! Don’t take anything. This is the property of the People!’ Immediately twenty voices were crying, ‘Stop! Put everything back! Don’t take anything! Property of the People!’ Many hands dragged the spoilers down. Damask and tapestry were snatched from the arms of those who had them; two men took away the bronze clock. Roughly and hastily the things were crammed back in their cases, and self-appointed sentinels stood guard. It was all utterly spontaneous. Through corridors and up staircases the cry could be heard growing fainter and fainter in the distance, ‘Revolutionary discipline! Property of the People!’….

We crossed back over to the left entrance, in the west wing. There order was also being established. ‘Clear the Palace!’, bawled a Red Guard, sticking his head through an inner door. ‘Come comrades lets show that we’re not thieves and bandits. Everybody out of the Palace except the Commissars until we get sentries posted.’

Two Red Guards, a soldier and an officer, stood with revolvers in their hands. Another soldier sat at a table behind them, with pen and paper. Shouts of ‘All out! All out!’ were heard far and near within, and the Army began to pour through the door, jostling, expostulating, arguing. As each man appeared he was seized by the self-appointed committee, who went through his pockets and looked under his coat. Everything that was plainly not his property was taken away, the man at the table noted it on his paper, and it was carried into a little room. The most amazing assortment of objects were thus confiscated; statuettes, bottles of ink, bed-spreads worked with the Imperial monogram, candles, a small oil painting, desk blotters, gold-handled swords, cakes of soap, clothes of every description, blankets.

The organisation of the uprising was not as spontaneous as Reed would have us believe. It was being directed by the Military Revolutionary Committee in the Smolny and the fact that they had sent a group of Preobrazhensky Guards to look after the Hermitage before the storming of the Winter Palace indicates their forethought. On the following day, 8 November, Lenin announced his government which included as Commissar for Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky, a forty-two-year-old writer and political activist who had studied philosophy in Switzerland and lived in Florence and Paris – as well as spending years in prison and exile. His job was a combination of minister of culture and education and he had two important qualifications for it, enthusiasm and understanding. He was well educated and personally acquainted with many of the country’s leading cultural figures, Shchukin and Benois among them.

Besides Lunacharsky, two special Commissars were appointed for the protection of museums and palaces, Grigory Yatmanov, who remained in charge for almost twenty years, and a Pole called Berngard Mandelbaum, who only lasted two months. A third figure who had some influence over the fate of the Hermitage was pretty, young Larisa Reisner, who became the Secretary of Narkompros (the Ministry of Enlightenment). On Lunacharsky’s advice, Yatmanov and Mandelbaum visited Benois on the morning of 8 November before they went to introduce themselves to the Hermitage staff. ‘For a whole hour I sought to hammer into the wooden-headed representative of Lunacharsky, Yatmanov, my ideas and elementary demands, without success,’ Benois writes. He describes the Commissar not wholly unsympathetically, however: ‘Yatmanov is rude only because of his stupidity and lack of education (and even then only moderately) and at least he is probably an honest man.’

Despite the difficulty of communicating it to Yatmanov, Benois’s advice prevailed. On 9 November, only two days after the Revolution, the head of the old Inventorisation Commission, Vasily Vereshchagin, was asked to check what was missing from the palace. He had been stopped by soldiers when he tried to get into the Winter Palace to make an inspection on his own account the day before but when he was asked to do it on behalf of the Bolshevik authorities he refused – Benois had to persuade him. On 10 November four members of the Commission accompanied by Yatmanov, Mandelbaum and Benois inspected roughly one hundred rooms. Vereshchagin dictated a report to the librarian V. Gelmerson as they moved from room to room:

There are traces of fierce battle in all the State Rooms of the First Spare Part, which housed the guards of the Provisional Government. The windows are shattered by bullets, scattered on the floor are dozens of mattresses on which the guards slept, some of them torn, the straw scattered, the furniture turned topsy-turvy in piles, having clearly served as barricades…. In the reception room of Emperor Alexander II, used as the private chancellery of A. F. Kerensky, the drawers have been pulled out of the desks, the cupboards of paperwork have been smashed, all the papers thrown all over the place…. In the personal apartments of the Emperor Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra Fedorovna, used by the Provisional Government, the tables and cupboards have been smashed, the floor covered with torn up and crumpled files of the Provisional Government. In the reception room a painting depicting the coronation of Alexander III has been defaced. A bayonet has been used to tear a portrait of the parents of the Empress … in the adjutant’s room, the study of Emperor Nicholas I, everything is turned over. Everything is tossed onto the floor…. In the rooms of the ladies-in-waiting corridor, the court and ball dresses are thrown all over the floor…. The study of Alexander III, turned by Chairman-Minister Kerensky into a bedroom, is scattered with papers of important state significance.

The report went to Lunacharsky and on 13 November he issued a decree on the protection and use of the palace:

Naturally enough, the treasures did not come back of their own accord. On 18 November the Military Revolutionary Committee gave Vereshchagin’s commission the right to conduct searches. They did not do it themselves but concentrated on drawing up as complete a list as they could manage of the items that were missing, identifying any special characteristics that would make them easy to search for. On 24 November several army battalions (1,000 soldiers) were sent to search the Alexandrovsky Market, the main place where you would have expected to find stolen goods for sale. The soldiers were not just looking for stolen treasures but also for food which had been hidden from the central authorities – which they confiscated and gave to the Central Food Administration – and for weapons. According to John Reed, about half the objects which had disappeared were found, some in the market and some in the baggage of foreigners leaving Russia.

Then came a flurry of hysteria over the fate of the Hermitage treasures which had been sent to Moscow for safekeeping. The Bolsheviks’ battle for ascendancy was more fiercely contested in Moscow than St Petersburg. Fighting between Bolshevik forces and moderates, organised around the Committee of Public Safety, lasted a week and cost more than a thousand lives. The fighting was particularly fierce around the Great Kremlin Palace and on 15 November it was erroneously reported in St Petersburg that the Hermitage treasures had been destroyed.

Lunacharsky reacted with vivid emotion, instantly handing in his resignation. He issued a public statement on the evening of 15 November:

In the same period Count Tolstoy gave an interview to a French journalist from the newspaper Le Petit Parisien and said: ‘Tell the civilised world that Russia no longer has the Hermitage.’ However, the reports from Moscow were conflicting and it was decided that the museum must send one of its own staff to find out the truth of what had happened. Yakov Smirnov, who had accompanied the treasures to Moscow and knew where they were stored, insisted that he should undertake this task. Getting there was not easy, with no seats on the train and drunk revolutionaries sitting singing on its roof.

However, the elderly scholar reached his destination. He visited the History Museum first where Prince Shcherbatov took him into the Novgorod Hall piled with boxes of paintings, drawings and engravings from the Hermitage. There were eight or nine bullet holes in the windows but the attackers had been shooting upwards and the bullets ricocheted off the ceiling without doing any damage. He went on to the Kremlin where the Hermitage treasures had also sustained no damage. His attempt to enter the Armoury was thwarted by new revolutionary bureaucracy – he was not allowed a pass. Colleagues who had been inside, however, assured him that all was well.

He despatched a telegram to St Petersburg saying ‘All safe’ but the telegraph office considered it of such low priority that it remained in a pile on the office desk and was never sent. Smirnov got back to the Hermitage in person on 24 November and the ten-day drama over the ‘destruction’ of the Hermitage treasures was put to rest. Lenin had already persuaded Lunacharsky to rescind his resignation.

Another fantastic drama also ensued and, for a few days, put the future of the great museum at risk. The imperial wine cellar was located underneath the Hermitage and, although the finest liquors had been removed to Moscow, the stock that remained was vast. According to Larisa Reisner, ‘first of all, they blockaded it with piles of wood, then they walled it up with a single line of bricks, then two layers of bricks. Nothing helped. Every night somewhere a hole would be made and people would suck out, lick out and draw out everything they could. Some mad, bare faced passion for the sweet would attract to this forbidden wall one crowd after another. After that, they tried putting a machine gun in every hole that was made.’

Count Tolstoy was well aware of the danger and ‘many times drew the attention of the powers that be’ to it. According to his memoirs there were tens of thousands of bottles of wine stored there. Wine merchants had offered eighteen million roubles for the cache, he said, but it was impossible to get the wine out safely. One day, coming in to work, he found the Hermitage

surrounded by armed sailors. Then I saw that from the gates of the Hermitage side of the Winter Canal they were carrying out a soldier who seemed to have drowned in wine. Broken bottles were lying on the frozen canal and puddles of wine that looked like blood stains on the snow. Thanks to my pass from the Commandant I could go through the sailors’ cordon and I heard that during the night the Preobrazhensky Guards had broken down the doors of the wine cellar, taken bottles out into the street and broken them there. The guards who were called also began to break bottles and the wine spilt in the cellar was more than two foot deep… All night long, they drank, drank, drank on the embankment, firing in the air. When it was possible to surround them, they lowered pipes from fire engine pumps and started to pump it out into the river.

Naturally enough in the circumstances, published accounts of what happened do not exactly coincide – apart from confirming, in every version, that a lot of soldiers, sailors and ordinary citizens managed to get very drunk indeed.

With hindsight, we would expect revolution to involve high drama and it is perhaps most surprising to find so much continuing as it was before. On the morning after the storming of the Winter Palace, the museum keepers and attendants reported for duty as usual – it takes time for a new regime to affect the minutiae of daily life. Then, on 23 November, Tolstoy and his staff decided to join the boycott of the Bolshevik authorities which had been launched by the civil servants in all government offices. Lunacharsky treated the boycott with forbearance and none of the existing staff was sacked. After a few weeks, it fizzled out and the Hermitage staff began, unwillingly, to work with the new Bolshevik authorities.

The correct balance of power between the attendants, as representatives of the proletariat, and the bourgeois, scholarly keepers was a problem that vexed all minds from March 1917 onwards. Yatmanov, the Commissar appointed by Lunacharsky, repeatedly urged the attendants to take over the museum. ‘Workers’ control’ was one of the platforms of the Bolshevik party, and workers’ councils (or soviets) were taking over the running of private enterprise all over the country. The Hermitage administration, in collaboration with that of the Russian Museum – of which Tolstoy was also the titular head – decided to send Lunacharsky a delegation. They argued that ‘museums are not conventional administrative institutions since they deal with things of scholarly and artistic interest which demand very special training and a certain level of cultural development … it would be very difficult to cut off administration from scholarship’.

Lunacharsky agreed that museums were a special case. ‘He himself thought that there should be a kind of artistic parliament,’ Tolstoy reports, ‘with 400 elected members, half of which were scholars and half representatives of the proletariat.’ In the event, nothing so ambitious came to pass. However, three new bodies were set up within the museum: a Council, comprising the keepers and director, a General Meeting which included the same people plus ‘all other educated service personnel and representatives of the young attendants’, and an Executive Committee comprising the director, two people elected from the senior staff and three from the younger – which worked very well, according to Tolstoy, thanks to the participation of the doorkeeper, Shchastnev, who was expert at smoothing things over.

In June 1918 Yatmanov granted Tolstoy leave of absence to travel down to the Ukraine where he had an estate. ‘I hoped I would return by autumn – I was not planning to resign. I could not hand my resignation to powers I did not want to recognise.’ However, while he was away Tolstoy received news of the death of the imperial family, which ‘shocked me so much that I found that I didn’t have the strength to have anything to do with the people responsible. Under the influence of these terrible events, I wrote to say that I would not return’.