Russian government officials are working to reassure museum workers that their institutions will not lose police protection after cutbacks were implemented on 1 November. The Ministry of Internal Affairs announced at the end of October that four key federal libraries, ten archives and 46 museums, including the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Moscow’s State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, and Yasnaya Polyana, the museum-estate of Leo Tolstoy, will remain under police guard.
“Museums will be fully guarded,” the deputy prime minister Olga Golodets said after a meeting with culture officials in Moscow, according to the Tass news agency. “The question of who will have responsibility for this is being worked out,” she added.
Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, has warned of the dangers museums face as Russian society becomes increasingly unsettled. In August, Russian Orthodox fundamentalists raided the Manezh exhibition hall near the Kremlin and damaged works that they deemed pornographic by Vadim Sidur, a Soviet-era artist. Oleg Antonov, a curator at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts who evaluated the damaged works, told the Izvestia newspaper that it might be safer to “hide away the artist’s works for the next, more understanding generation”.