The way in which archaeology came to play a major role in the life of the Hermitage after the Revolution is one of the quirkiest features of the museum’s evolution. One of the important factors that encouraged this orientation was the Communist Party’s efforts to rewrite history in support of the theories of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. There was not much that could be done with the history of post-Renaissance European art, apart from reclassifying it as ‘art in the era of disintegration of feudal society’ or ‘art in the era of industrial capitalism’. Archaeology, however, deals with the reconstruction, on the basis of newly discovered artefacts, of the lifestyle of forgotten peoples and its findings could be massaged by the Soviet authorities to show that the evolution of Marx’s dialectical materialism was inevitable – the main preoccupation of the 1920s and early 1930s – or that the ethnic superiority of the Slavs was established in antiquity – a patriotic theme brought to the fore by the threat of war with Hitler. From the 1930s onwards, the Soviet government poured money into archaeological expeditions on a massive scale while the Party hierarchy dictated, broadly speaking, what results should be obtained.

The Hermitage gained many unexpected rewards from this orientation. On top of its traditional role as a repository of Western art and Classical antiquities, it became the most important archaeological museum in Russia and one of the most important in the world. The staff were allowed to conduct their own excavations across the whole territory of the Soviet Union, at sites ranging in date from Neolithic times to the Middle Ages, as well as helping with digs run by other institutions. The high standing of archaeology also helped in the development of three new departments, the Oriental Department which evolved under the direction of Iosif Orbeli from 1920 onwards, the Department of Archaeology of Eastern Europe and Siberia, founded in 1931, and the Department of the History of Russian Culture which opened in 1941, just before the museum was evacuated to escape Hitler’s invasion.

Another result of this orientation has been the preference for archaeologist–directors. After the turbulent succession of Party apparatchiks who directed the museum between 1928 and 1934, it was a relief for all concerned to have scholars in charge. For, despite the glow of official approbation in which archaeology basked, many good scholars chose to become archaeologists in the Soviet period because it was a field where genuine research could be undertaken without serious political interference.

Since the day that Iosif Orbeli took over in 1934, the museum has been run almost exclusively by practising archaeologists; the exception is the brief directorship of Vitaly Suslov, an expert on Russian painting of the Soviet period. Suslov was only allowed a twenty-one month interregnum between the death of Boris Piotrovsky in October 1990 and the appointment of his son Mikhail Piotrovsky, the present director, in July 1992. Orbeli, who was an expert on Sassanian art and excavated in the Caucasus, was succeeded in 1951 by Mikhail Artamonov, an expert on the Khazar and Scythian cultures. He was followed in 1964 by Boris Piotrovsky, who specialised in Urartu and Egypt, while his son is an Islamic scholar who has conducted his own excavations in the Yemen. The Hermitage was the Soviet government’s cultural flagship and only archaeologists were considered reliable enough to run it.

The patron saint of Russian archaeology in the pre-war period was a crazy genius called Nikolay Marr, who was a member of the Hermitage Council and had a very direct influence on the museum’s development. It was the Soviet habit to create heroes whose example could be held up to the nation. There were war heroes, heroes of labour – factory workers, farm workers – and in a similar spirit, Marr was built up by the press and radio as a hero of scholarship.

He was born in Georgia in 1864, the son of an eighty-year-old Scottish gardener and a young Georgian peasant woman. According to his biographer, B. M. Alpatov, Marr’s father, who died when he was ten, could not speak a word of Georgian, while his mother could not speak English, and their lack of communication stimulated in their son a passion for languages, ancient and modern. He studied linguistics in the department of Eastern Languages of the University of St Petersburg, where he graduated effortlessly from student to researcher to professor and finally to director of the faculty. In addition to work of lasting significance on the grammar of Georgian, Armenian and other languages of the Caucasus, Marr gradually developed lofty theories on the interaction of language, culture and archaeology, most of which are now dismissed as bunkum.

It was his invention of the ‘Japhetic’ family of languages that led to his involvement with Soviet archaeology. Starting from the erroneous assumption that the languages of the Caucasus were not Indo-European in origin, Marr postulated a second family of languages with a common root in antiquity which he called Japhetic – after Noah’s third son Japhet. This linguistic family grew steadily in size and cultural significance; Marr claimed the Basque language of northern Spain had a Japhetic origin, along with Etruscan and several of the languages of Southern India. He then needed to find a common origin for them in the dead languages of the ancient Caucasus, which led him to study Urartian inscriptions and attempt to decipher them; Urartu was a mysterious empire that flourished in Turkey, Armenia and the Caucasus around the eighth century BC. It was a short step from the study of inscriptions to the study of ancient cultures and archaeological remains. In the words of Boris Piotrovsky, the Japhetic theory ‘was full of contradictions and totally brilliant guesses; it was essentially a hotchpotch of ideas, often incorrectly presented’.

Marr does not appear to have had any pronounced political views and was equally happy that his studies should be supported by the imperial academic establishment or the Bolsheviks. During the six-month rule of the Provisional Government in 1917, he and a group of colleagues drew up plans for a new archaeological academy which the Bolsheviks presented to Lenin after they had seized power. Most of the intelligentsia were boycotting the Bolsheviks at the time and Lenin seems to have seen Marr’s project as an opportunity to create a great new academic institution to serve as a flagship for the new era. By a decree of 18 April 1919 he launched the Academy of the History of Material Culture, which took over the role of the old Imperial Archaeological Commission and extended it. Marr was made its first director and, in 1924, was given the Marble Palace that Catherine the Great had built for Grigory Orlov as a headquarters.

The country’s most distinguished archaeologists shifted across from the Imperial Commission to the new Academy, which became an important institution with wide-ranging international contacts until Stalin began to impose strict Party discipline on all walks of life in the late 1920s. Marr belonged to the old guard of pre-revolutionary scholars but he joined the Communist Party in 1919 and came up with a theory of cultural and linguistic development in pre-history which appeared to accord perfectly with Marxism. In essence, he claimed that peoples evolved from one stage of technological and cultural development to the next according to an inevitable process of revolutionary phase transitions, which were not affected by migrations and cross-cultural influences. His postulation that the evolutionary process was the same for all the peoples of the world accorded neatly with the Marxist view of history and the internationalism of the Bolsheviks who, at the time, regarded world revolution as the next, inevitable development on the political stage.

From its inception, the Academy of the History of Material Culture worked closely with the museum. Initially it had its offices – those of the old Imperial Archaeological Commission – inside the New Hermitage building and later the two institutions shared many staff. Three directors of the Hermitage, Iosif Orbeli, Mikhail Artamonov and Boris Piotrovsky, were Marr’s pupils and all three worked for both institutions. Orbeli was the first to be recruited by the museum – partly as a result of Marr’s influence – but he continued to work at the Academy and, after the Academy’s name was changed to ‘Institute of the History of Material Culture’ in 1937, was simultaneously director of the Institute and the museum for a period of two years (1937–9). Artamonov succeeded him at the Institute, directing it from 1939 to 1943, and Piotrovsky was director of the Institute from 1953 to 1964.

Artamonov and Piotrovsky belonged to the new generation of scholars who acquired their education after the Revolution. Their characters contrasted sharply with each other and with the flamboyant brilliance and aggression of Orbeli. Artamonov was the son of a peasant and served the Revolution as a young man. He took part in the Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies during World War I and was sent to run a bank when its staff boycotted the new Bolshevik government. He began his archaeological studies as an adult student in the 1920s. Older Hermitage staff remember him as a great director who had the courage to ignore Party directives and who created an atmosphere of scholarship in the museum – a quiet man, a poet and a notable administrator who never lost his regional accent. Piotrovsky, in contrast, came from a family of soldiers and educators who had belonged to the minor nobility – his younger brother was denied a university education by the Bolsheviks on account of his class origins. As director of the museum he was open and friendly, more careful than Artamonov to retain good relations with the Party bureaucracy, but acknowledged throughout the length and breadth of the country as a great scholar and Academician. His good looks and eloquence, despite a pronounced stutter, made him a hit on television.

In the early days of Bolshevik rule, Marr was constantly in and out of the museum. He was voted on to the Hermitage Council where, together with Sergey Oldenburg, the eminent Orientalist, he backed the appointment of Iosif Orbeli to the museum staff in the hope of strengthening its commitment to his beloved Caucasus. Orbeli joined the museum in 1920 to run a new ‘Section of the Muslim Medieval Period’, which changed its name in 1921 to the ‘Section of the Caucasus, Iran and Central Asia’ and, in 1926, became a fully fledged ‘Oriental Department’, in its own right.

Orbeli had studied under Marr at the university and became his close assistant in the years immediately preceding the Revolution when they worked together on a big excavation at Ani, in present-day Turkey. They made a strong team, with Marr playing the role of vague professor and Orbeli that of efficient organiser. They ran the only Russian archaeological expedition mounted in the course of World War I, following the Russian troops who had penetrated into Asia Minor and excavating at the site of the former Urartian capital, Toprakkale, on Lake Van in present-day Turkey. The hunt was on for the ‘source’ of Japhetic languages and Orbeli contributed by finding a stone stele with a lengthy inscription recording events in the reign of the Urartian King Sarduri II, dating from the mid-eighth century BC.

Another St Petersburg archaeologist came on the Toprakkale expedition: Alexander Miller, who was to run the Archaeology Department of Leningrad University after the Revolution and was also, briefly, a member of the Hermitage Council – he taught both Artamonov and Piotrovsky. Miller was one of the many archaeologists who suffered under Stalin’s purge of the St Petersburg intelligentsia in the 1930s – almost all the archaeologists of the older generation were arrested at this time. Some were shot, others exiled or sent to the camps. Miller was arrested in 1933 and died in exile in Siberia a few years later. His crime was ‘writing long drawn-out reports on things he had excavated’, otherwise known as ‘empiricism’. According to his accuser: ‘empiricism is a convenient screen behind which you can hide whilst deviating from Marxism’.

His archaeologist brother, Mikhail Miller, escaped to the West where he set about publicising the sufferings of his colleagues. His book Archaeology in the USSR, published in 1956, paints a vivid picture of what was happening. He explains how the trouble began in the late 1920s:

At numerous meetings young students who were members of the Komsomol, at the prompting of their Party cells, criticised from a Party viewpoint the concepts and individual works of the older archaeological scholars. The criticism consisted of direct attacks and overt accusations of being anti-Marxist and anti-Soviet. At lectures given in the university archaeological departments, Komsomol members among the students used to cry out, ‘Take off the mask!’ ‘Show your true face!’ ‘What is your attitude to Marxism?’ and so forth. The older professors and scholars were required to renounce publicly their old views, confess their errors and declare their loyalty to Marxism and the Soviet regime.

A turning point came in late 1929 when Professor Vladislav Ravdonikas, a local historian from Lake Ladoga who was well in with the Party, gave a report to the assembled members of Marr’s Academy titled ‘For a Soviet History of Material Culture’ which, for the first time, criticised other archaeologists by name and attempted to set out how archaeological studies should be conducted in future. The term ‘archaeology’ was to be replaced with ‘Marxist history of material culture’, and ‘bourgeois’ classifications, such as Stone Age or Bronze Age, were banned. His published report set the tone for archaeology across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. As a Party ‘trusty’ he was given charge of the department of Archaeology at the Hermitage – then known as the ‘Department of Pre-Class Society’ – from 1932 to 1935. The Department had been set up in 1931 by Marr’s chief disciple, Ivan Meshchaninov, who was also well in with the Party and a ‘Hero of Socialist Labour’.

In 1931 an All-Russian Conference for Archaeology and Ethnography was held at the Academy of the History of Material Culture and the Party workers took it upon themselves to organise an exhibition of Soviet archaeological literature. Mikhail Miller says that this was the beginning of the end for the old guard:

Boris Piotrovsky was arrested at a party thrown by fellow archaeologists in February 1935 and spent forty days in prison; he notes in his memoirs that the Hermitage took him straight back after this experience, while he had to take the Academy to court in order to get reinstated there. However, he himself considered that he had had it easy: ‘Conditions were much better than they were later on. We still got food, and notes from home, and cultural activists in the detention centre brought in bundles of books, fiction and a wide selection of other things, which they distributed round the cells.’ The story of other members of the Hermitage staff who lost their jobs or their lives during the Stalinist purges will be told in the next chapter.

Together with the purges came a new scheme for the socio-economic periodisation of history which all historians and archaeologists were thereafter expected to use in their writings; it also provided the basis for Legran’s Marxist Reconstruction of the Hermitage. Miller lays it out thus:

I Pre-class society: (a) formation of human society; (b) pre-clan era; (c) clan matriarchal society; (d) clan patriarchal society; (e) stage of decomposition of the clan (transition of the clan to the village community).

II Class society, slave-holding formation: (a) oriental, primitive slave-holding society; (b) developed, ancient slave-holding society.

III Feudal system: (a) early feudalism; (b) developed or later feudalism.

IV Capitalist society.

V Classless society: (a) socialism; (b) communism. Communist society is the final stage of development and is not subject to further changes.

Very little field work or scientific publication was undertaken during the period 1930–4, when every surviving archaeologist was busily reinterpreting his previous work in terms of the new formation. Articles in learned journals were all devoted to the new orientation under titles such as ‘Marx–Engels and the Basic Problems of Pre-Class Society’ or ‘Engels’ Theory of the Origin of Man and the Morphological Peculiarities of the Skeletal Remains of Sinanthropus’. The Academy of the History of Material Culture published a volume entitled Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin on Primitive Society. Miller lists those archaeologists whose scientific papers were never subsequently accepted for publication. They include Sergey Oldenburg, the Orientalist and champion of the integrity of the Hermitage collections, and Oskar Waldhauer, the indefatigable curator of Classical antiquities who had defended his collection through the Revolution and briefly succeeded Troinitsky as acting director of the museum.

Nikolay Marr, whose principal theories coincided so neatly with Marxism, remained unmoved by the storms around him, although Piotrovsky records that a group of Communists in the Academy set up an organisation called the Linguistic Front which attempted to criticise him. It may perhaps be regarded as good fortune for the distinguished old man that he suffered a haemorrhage of the brain in October 1933 and died the following year. He was accorded a hero’s funeral. His coffin lay in state in the Marble Palace and was carried to its permanent resting place in the Communist Square of the Alexander Nevsky monastery’s cemetery – the place of honour at the time – on a catafalque draped in red flags, attended by a military guard and representatives of the government.

Relative peace broke out in the archaeological establishment in 1935. Stalin, who had finally achieved the power of an absolute dictator, announced that during 1930–4 the Soviet Union had ‘changed at the roots, casting off the guise of backwardness and medievalism…. From a dark, illiterate and uncultured country, she became, or more correctly, is becoming a literate and cultured country.’ And, as Miller explains: ‘under these conditions a demand arose for the continuous growth and raising of the general level of education and science. The works of scholars were expected not only to be on a high ideological level but also to show a profound knowledge and use of factual scientific material. Learned degrees and the defence of dissertations, which had been abolished at the beginning of the Revolution, were reintroduced.’ In this more scholarly atmosphere, the terms ‘archaeology’, ‘Stone Age’, ‘Bronze Age’, ‘Paleolithic’, ‘Neolithic’, etc., were allowed back into circulation.

The period from 1935 to 1950, despite Hitler’s intervention in their lives, was something of a golden age for Soviet archaeologists. Finance for archaeological excavations and research was liberally available, especially for those whose work served a patriotic purpose by illuminating the illustrious past of the Russian people. The Party called for special efforts in the study of the genesis of the Eastern Slavs so as to prove by archaeological means that the historical Slavs, as well as their prehistoric ancestors, were from time immemorial the inhabitants and masters of the territory of the European part of the Soviet Union. However, as Miller points out, ‘the task was difficult, not to say impossible, since this historical concept, dictated by political demands, did not find confirmation in the data of archaeology’.

Broadly speaking, archaeologists were prepared to adjust their findings to coincide with political requirements – in most cases it meant fairly minor compromises. However, in 1950 Stalin suddenly upset the apple cart by personally attacking ‘Marrism’, the archaeological orientation that had previously been considered sacrosanct. There was a new flood of dismissals and arrests and archaeologists, who had been rigorously toeing the Marrist line, hurried to reconstruct their previous theses in the light of Stalin’s ‘brilliant’ contribution.

Stalin himself contributed two long articles to Pravda on ‘Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics’, which excoriated Marr and all of Marr’s disciples. He had made no public statements for the previous five years – on any subject – and his signed articles were greeted with an explosion of fervour out of proportion to their content. His biographer Isaac Deutscher notes that:

Stalin’s intervention was followed by a witch-hunt of ‘Marrists’ which inevitably affected the Hermitage – where Orbeli and Piotrovski, who had become Orbeli’s deputy in 1949, were both Marr pupils. In 1951 Orbeli, now a seasoned autocrat who brooked no contradiction in the running of his museum, even from the Party, chose to tender his resignation over a minor dispute – a strategy for getting his own way that he had often used before. On this occasion, to his outrage, the resignation was accepted. Artamonov, then pro-rector of Leningrad University, was appointed to replace him, despite the fact that he, also, had studied with Marr and introduced ‘Marrist’ ideas into his writings. Artamonov’s star was riding high at the time as a result of his important work on the Khazars, a forgotten people whose emperors, he demonstrated, had ranked in importance with those of Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire in the seventh to tenth centuries and whom he presented as an important influence on the Russian state.

However he, too, was brought down to earth within a year of his appointment. In January 1952 Pravda thundered a denunciation of his work; it appears that the powers that be had suddenly discovered that the Khazars were Jews. ‘The Khazar kingdom, far from promoting the development of the ancient Russian State, retarded the progress of the eastern Slav tribes,’ said Pravda. ‘The materials obtained by our archaeologists indicate the high level of culture in ancient Russia. Only by flouting the historical truth and neglecting the facts can one speak of the superiority of the Khazar culture. The idealization of the Khazar kingdom reflects a manifest survival of the defective views of the bourgeois historians who belittled the indigenous development of the Russian people. The erroneousness of this concept is evident. Such a conception cannot be accepted by Soviet historiography.’

In order to survive as director of the Hermitage, Artamonov had to grovel and admit to making terrible mistakes. A surviving letter to the secretary of the Leningrad Regional Party Committee makes this pathetically clear:

Piotrovsky was also under fire. After Orbeli’s departure, Artamonov had kept him on as deputy director but he was regularly accused of defending Marr and supporting out-of-date theories alien to Marxism. By diligently defending himself against attack, however, he managed to turn the tables and come out of the imbroglio holding a winning card. To understand what happened one needs to appreciate that the anti-Marrist witch-hunt was caught up with the rivalry between the Leningrad and Moscow branches of the Institute of the History of Material Culture. During the years of Marr’s ascendancy, that is from 1917 until Stalin’s articles in 1950, Leningrad archaeologists, who were mostly Marr’s pupils, were undisputed masters in the field. Now Moscow was taking its revenge. Leningrad was demoted to the status of a branch of the Moscow Institute in 1951 and Moscow became the publishing base for the Institute’s learned journals and the source of funds for excavations.

When Piotrovsky was called to the regional Party headquarters in the Smolny in 1953 and offered the job of director of the Leningrad branch of the Institute, his first thought was that this was a subtle plot by Moscow to get the branch closed down. ‘I said that this would lead to increased criticism against me. They would close the section altogether, which was what the Moscow archaeologists were dreaming of,’ he writes in his memoirs. ‘But the Party secretary said that they would not be allowed to do that since the Leningrad Party organisation would not permit it and announced that from 1 May I must move to the Institute. The City Committee was not against my working at the Hermitage in parallel.’

Later, when Artamonov had offended the Party establishment by ignoring their dictats, Piotrovsky was, in his turn, appointed director of the Hermitage. His attitude to the Party bosses was more conciliatory and he managed to remain director from 1964 to his death in 1990 – although he came within a hair’s breadth of enforced resignation in the early 1980s. His long reign naturally reinforced the importance of archaeology within the museum structure. Furthermore, despite all the political shenanigans, the museum’s involvement with archaeology has produced results of lasting importance to world culture.

Piotrovsky himself brought to light the character and history of the ancient civilisation of Urartu whose remains had previously been ignored or misinterpreted. As he wrote himself in 1969:

Time has dealt in different ways with the kingdoms of the past. The fame of some of them has resounded through the ages; the memory of men has preserved the names of their kings, their triumphs and achievements…. But elsewhere the situation was very different. A kingdom which had known its period of greatness and then declined would sink into total oblivion; the achievements of its rulers, such of its buildings as were spared by the passage of time, and even its oral traditions would be ascribed to other nations, often enough to the very nations that had been its enemies; and it would disappear for many centuries from human consciousness. This was the fate of Urartu, a kingdom which developed in the mountainous area around Lake Van, on the territory of present-day Turkey, and became a powerful force in Western Asia between the ninth and seventh centuries BC. Then, early in the sixth century, the kingdom of Urartu was overthrown and soon afterwards forgotten, in the turmoil which accompanied the formation of new nations and new kingdoms in the territory which it had controlled.

Urartu’s rediscovery can be counted the happiest consequence of Nikolay Marr’s determination to find an origin for his spurious Japhetic theory of language. He and Orbeli had already excavated on Lake Van before the Revolution, searching for hieroglyphic remains of its language. Marr set his disciple Ivan Meshchaninov the job of compiling an Urartian grammar and he set his bright young student, Boris Piotrovsky, the task of studying its history. Piotrovsky’s first love was Egyptology but in March 1930, he tells us in his memoirs, Marr came to him and said: ‘Egypt was a long way off and there was no knowing when it would be possible for me to go there, but in the Caucasus, in Armenia, there was a whole unrevealed culture of one of the peoples of the ancient state, the Urartians. We knew of inscriptions on rock faces in Soviet Armenia. He said I should start seeking monuments of this culture in the Transcaucasus.’ This brought Piotrovsky into the orbit of Orbeli, who was head of the sector of the Academy where those studying the Urartian language worked.

When Meshchaninov set up the Department of ‘Pre-Class Society’ at the Hermitage in 1931, Piotrovsky went with him as a junior researcher. However, he was soon transferred, at Orbeli’s insistence, to the museum’s Department of Antiquities to look after the miscellaneous collection of artefacts from Urartu and the Transcaucasus – there were some notable bronzes that had been bought from clandestine diggers in the nineteenth century. Through the 1930s Piotrovsky explored Armenia on summer expeditions searching for a site that offered opportunities for a major excavation. He finally settled on the mound of Karmir-Blur on the outskirts of Yerevan and the excavation was launched in a most promising manner by Orbeli’s scholarly girlfriend and fellow curator, Camilla Trever.

In the summer of 1939, as Piotrovsky gathered his team to commence digging, Orbeli visited the site with Trever and the head of the Armenian Branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The latter, gesticulating excitedly with a cigarette, inadvertently burned Trever’s hand. She screamed, dropped her handbag and as she bent to pick it up noticed a broken stone with a cuneiform inscription. It fitted into a second fragment, found by Piotrovsky on an earlier visit, to make the name of King Rusa of Urartu, the son of Argishti, who reigned in the seventh century BC.

Piotrovsky was to excavate at Karmir-Blur for almost thirty years and the site, which turned out to be an important border fortress, gradually revealed its secrets. In 1945 an inscription was found on the hinge of a storeroom door which told him the settlement’s name: ‘The fortress of the city of Teishebaini, belonging to King Rusa, son of Argishti’, it read. Even then the excavators could not be certain that the old bronze latch had not come from another site. But in 1962 they found the foundations of a temple with two long cuneiform inscriptions. King Rusa, it was written, had built this temple in the city of Teishebaini, which had been a desert before he began his building. The inscriptions also recorded what sacrifices had been made to the Urartian gods and goddesses in honour of the building work – bulls, kids and sheep had been sacrificed to the gods and cows to the goddesses.

The excavations provided an extraordinary insight into the daily life of Urartu. The fortress had been abandoned in the sixth century BC after a successful night attack by the Scythians, following which they had set the settlement on fire. The surprise element of the attack meant that the burned remains of life had been buried without any previous tidying up. There was sesame oil cake on the floor of the oil press, traces of malted barley in a stone vat where beer was brewed, sawn-off pieces of horn – and saws – in a room used for working stagshom. There were traces of pests – weevils and ants – in the grain store.

There were also jewellers’ and metal workers’ workshops; the remains of plums, grapes, quinces, cherries and pomegranates; 400 vast pottery wine jars – sufficient to store 9,000 gallons of wine; 1,036 polished red pottery jugs to pour it out and hundreds of bronze cups to drink from. In a formerly dank storeroom there was a wasps’ nest and the skeleton of a frog. And in an accidentally formed vacuum a flower that had fallen from a pomegranate tree was perfectly preserved – the petals had fallen but the rest was intact.

Thus Piotrovsky rediscovered Urartu and pieced its history together. The first tentative suggestion that such a civilisation had flourished had been made by a French scholar in 1827; in the 1890s the Russian historian Mikhail Nikolsky had travelled round the Transcaucasus collecting inscriptions; in the late nineteenth century treasure hunters had raided Urartian sites and sold their unidentified finds to the British Museum, the Hermitage and the Louvre; in the early twentieth century, Marr, Miller and Orbeli – and other teams – had excavated at Lake Van. Putting these, previously unconnected, elements together, Piotrovsky wrote the first history of Urartu in the cellars of the Hermitage, by candlelight, during Hitler’s siege of Leningrad in 1941–2.

The most important discoveries at Karmir-Blur, however, were made after the war and Piotrovsky subsequently revised and extended his book. Most of his finds are now displayed in the Historical Museum of Armenia in Yerevan but one room in the archaeological section of the Hermitage is also devoted to artefacts from Urartu, including shields, swords, wine vessels, jugs and a remarkable bronze, half woman, half beast, which formed part of a throne dismantled by treasure hunters in the nineteenth century.

As museum exhibits, however, they are outshone by the remains of other civilisations. The most extraordinary, and visually exciting, archaeology galleries of the Hermitage contain the tomb furnishings buried with nomadic chieftains, priests and other high-ranking individuals in the valley of Pazyryk, in the high Altai mountains, between the fifth and third centuries BC – and some of the mummified chieftains themselves. The richly coloured textiles, felt, leather, furs, elegantly carved wooden artefacts and even tattooed human skin from these tombs had been frozen for over 2,000 years. It is a unique survival; elsewhere articles made in antiquity from such organic materials have crumbled into dust. Like a giant deep freeze, the permafrost at these high altitudes preserved them. The pieces, moreover, display great artistry and technical skill. They include a pile carpet which the tribal chief in whose grave it lay, neatly folded, must have obtained from Persia. It predates all other known carpets by more than 1,000 years but its artistry is as sophisticated as sixteenth-century survivals. The red, velvety carpet – 3,600 knots per 1 ½ square inches – is framed by a file of grazing deer and a procession of horsemen.

It shares the honours in visual terms with a huge thirty-five square metres felt wall hanging of appliqué work made by the tribe itself and, no doubt, carried around to keep the draughts from the chieftain’s tent. This depicts a female figure seated on a throne holding a flowering branch while a male rider approaches her; they are surrounded by lotus flowers, foliage and the stylised antlers of deer, all in rich colours. There are also wonderfully lifelike stuffed felt swans which some experts think were originally associated with the wall hanging, but others prefer to see as ornaments for a wooden carriage found nearby. The carriage is also a unique survival, a complex structure of wooden poles and leather straps – not a single nail was used – which was drawn by four stocky Mongolian horses that lay, preserved in the permafrost, nearby.

The nomadic tribes of southern Siberia, closely related to the Scythians who made their way westward to the Black Sea area, chose to bury their dead in the high mountains surrounding their summer pastures. The first attempt to excavate a frozen tomb was made in the 1870s but a serious study of them – and all the great discoveries – belong to the Soviet era. The first exploratory investigations were made in 1924–6 by Sergey Rudenko, who worked simultaneously for the Academy of the History of Material Culture and the Ethnography Department of Leningrad’s Russian Museum but, at the time, he did not have enough money to open a frozen barrow. In 1929 he went back with his pupil Mikhail Gryaznov to explore the hilly Gorno-Altai region, where he had previously found a valley with a whole row of barrows, known to the locals as Pazyryk.

Rudenko, Gryaznov and a team of fifteen workers proceeded to open the first frozen barrow in the Pazyryk valley. It was virgin territory with grass up to their heads; there were no roads, so they travelled up there on horses, and there was no nearby village, so they had to carry their own food supply. When they started digging they found that the barrow was covered with large boulders which the horses had to drag off. The soil underneath was rock hard with permafrost. They boiled water at the edge of the site, threw it on the earth and dug as it melted. Beneath they found huge timbers forming a room-sized wooden box for the burial. Clearly those who built the barrows foresaw the danger of robbery and attempted to make their tombs impenetrable.

They were right to fear that this would happen. All the Pazyryk tombs turned out to have been robbed in antiquity – before they were fully frozen. Greedy for gold, silver and jewels, the looters carried off the ceremonial weapons of the dead and, taking bodies from the half-frozen coffins, cut off a hand for a bracelet, a finger for a ring or a head for its torque. However, clothing, cloth, leather, wooden artefacts and anything made from humble materials were left behind beside the desecrated corpses. The wooden tombs, it was found, were always surrounded by sacrificed horses which the robbers had not touched – chestnut horses, still completely frozen, wearing richly ornamental harness, carved from wood in swirling animal forms and plated in gold.

The process of archaeological discovery was then rudely interrupted by the political witch-hunt in progress in Leningrad. Rudenko was arrested in 1933 and sent as forced labour to help build the White Sea Canal – he did not return until 1939. Gryaznov was arrested one year later and charged with being an Ukrainian nationalist. As he had never even visited the Ukraine, he was returned to circulation quite rapidly. However, Hitler’s war was approaching and Rudenko and Gryaznov did not resume the excavations at Pazyryk until 1947. Rudenko, by that time, was working at the Institute of the History of Material Culture, while Gryaznov divided his time between the Institute and the Hermitage. He and the Pazyryk finds had been transferred from the Russian Museum to the Hermitage in 1941 when the new Russian Department opened. The two archaeologists excavated four more barrows between 1947 and 1949 and made discoveries which were to stir the imagination of the whole world.

During the 1940s and 1950s, however, the main thrust of Soviet archaeology was directed towards the study of ethnogenesis and aimed at a patriotic enhancement of the ancient peoples who had fathered the latter-day Soviet Union. This meant, on one hand, a determined and unsuccessful effort to link the Scythians to the Eastern Slavs and, on the other, extensive study of medieval sites in Russia and the autonomous republics. Far more archaeological effort has been devoted to the medieval period in Russia than in the West, where sites of this period only began to be excavated in the 1960s. The most remarkable medieval excavation run by the Hermitage, in collaboration with local archaeologists, is that of the city of Pendjikent in Tadjikistan. Situated on the border with Uzbekistan, some forty miles from Samarkand, the city flourished from the fifth to the eight century AD, after which its population was forcibly moved elsewhere.

The rediscovery of Pendjikent is the result of a romantic accident. In 1932 a shepherd grazing his sheep on the heights of the nearby Mug Mountain came across a basket of manuscripts. They turned out to be written in the language of Sogdiana, the civilisation which flourished in the area around AD 500 to 700. Leningrad archaeologists dug on the site of this discovery and unearthed a fortress and more manuscripts, which they identified as the archives of Dewastich, the last king of Pendjikent. He must have taken the manuscripts with him on his flight from the capital before being defeated and crucified by the Arabs in AD 722. This turned attention to the city of Pendjikent itself.

Joint excavations run by the Hermitage, the Institute of the History of Material Culture and the Tadjikistan Academy began in 1946 and are still continuing. The city extends across the plain and includes a citadel, palaces, dwelling houses, temples, workshops of many trades and shops. However, its great glory is its murals. Each aristocratic house had a huge reception hall, measuring up to ninety-five square yards, whose walls were painted from top to bottom. The murals depict, on the one hand, aristocratic life in Pendjikent – banquets, apparently restricted to men, libations to the family deity, concerts, recitals – and, on the other, local legends and epic sagas hitherto only known from fragmentary allusions in Persian texts of the Islamic period.

The discovery of the murals has called into being a new Hermitage Restoration Department which specialises in the preservation of wall paintings. Some of the murals have been treated on site and others, brought back for painstaking attention in St Petersburg, are now on display in the Hermitage galleries. The expertise of these restorers has been equally useful in preserving the medieval murals that decorated the churches of the old city of Pskov in northern Russia. Hermitage archaeologists worked there over a forty-year period, in collaboration with local experts, to reopen the site of the so-called Dovmont City, in the centre of town, investigating its architecture and tracing the development of its streets. The excavation site has been turned into an open-air museum and fragments of its medieval murals are now displayed in the Hermitage galleries.

Artamonov, who became director of the Hermitage in 1951, had also begun his career by studying the medieval period. He worked on the frescoes of Staraya Ladoga, a medieval village some fifty miles east of St Petersburg, close to the vast Lake Ladoga, out of which the River Neva flows down to the sea. Then he joined his professor, Alexander Miller’s, excavations of Scythian sites on the estuary of the Don and acquired an expertise on the Lower Don, the Caucasus and the Steppes which stretched from the Bronze Age to the Middle Ages.

While Artamonov swung in and out of favour with the authorities like other archaeologists – he was demoted from director of the Institute of the History of Material Culture to head of the Bronze and Early Iron Age sector of the Institute in the mid-1940s – he remained one the grandees of the archaeological establishment. It was natural therefore that he should have been recruited to direct the most ambitious archaeological undertaking of the whole Soviet era, the investigation of the territory which was to be flooded by the building of the Volga-Don Canal.

The excavation’s main focus of attention was the Khazar fortress of Sarkel on the lower reaches of the Don. In around 833 the Khazar king had sent an embassy to the Byzantine Emperor Theophilus asking him for architects and craftsmen to help build the fortress to protect his empire from invasion by the Norsemen, or ‘Rus’, as they were called in the East. The excavation yielded the first full story of the daily life of the Khazars, innumerable artefacts and the remains of sixth-century Byzantine marble columns – useful building materials that had presumably been contributed by Theophilus himself.

This massive excavation was supported by the allocation of prisoners from the local prison camp to handle the heavy digging and earth movements – 600,000 prisoners worked on the Volga-Don Canal. The atmosphere was unusually grim for an archaeological expedition. In the first year there were still houses for the visitors to live in; after that the houses had been cleared and the archaeologists lived in tents surrounded by control towers that watched for runaway prisoners. The main prison was some eleven miles away from the site but the prisoners helping with the dig lived in a barbed wire encampment next door – which they were marched into and out of in columns, night and morning. They were mostly ‘politicals’, a lot of them women who had been arrested for such crimes as holding back two pounds of grain from harvest fields so as to feed their own families.

The archaeologists and other specialists from Leningrad – there was a team of over one hundred – made friends with the prisoners and worked a nine-hour day beside them, starting at 4 a.m. in the morning and breaking at midday to avoid the extreme heat. For a couple of decades, whenever the museum’s Archaeology Department threw a really good party, it would end with everyone drunkenly singing songs of the Gulag of the 1940s that they had learned on the Volga-Don expedition. When Artamonov compiled his curriculum vitae in 1953, he listed his two most important publications as The History of the USSR from the Ancient Times to the Beginning of the Old Russian State, vols 1-2, 1939 and The History of Old Russian Culture: Works of the Volga-Don Expedition (1958, 1959 and 1963).

Since pre-perestroika days, the artefacts recovered from Sarkel by the Volga-Don expedition have been locked away in the Hermitage storerooms, mostly in a series of vast basement rooms on the Admiralty side of the Winter Palace. There are only two vitrines of Sarkel items in the public exhibition. No one wished to draw attention to this particular civilisation. The Khazars spoke Turkish while extracting tribute money from the Russians and – worst of all – converted to Judaism in AD 740. Moreover, Artamonov himself fell foul of the Communist Party establishment in 1964 and was sacked from the museum.