The Russian Museum

The Russian Museum's case for itself is completeness rather than any single masterpiece: it is the only museum built specifically to hold the full run of Russian art in one place, from medieval icons through to the Soviet avant-garde, in a country where most comparable holdings are split between Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery and Saint Petersburg's own Hermitage, whose collecting has always been international rather than national. Its strongest ground is the 19th century - the Bryullov, Repin, Aivazovsky and Kuindzhi canvases that most visitors come to see - and the roughly 6,000-strong Old Russian icon collection that opens the chronological display. Its avant-garde holdings, built almost entirely from post-1917 nationalisations rather than purchase, are a secondary but genuine strength, concentrated in the Benois Wing.

The Russian Museum's main building was not built as a museum. Carlo Rossi designed it in the 1820s as the Saint Petersburg residence of Grand Duke Michael Pavlovich, the youngest son of Emperor Paul I, and construction began on 26 June 1819 on land near St Michael's Castle. Rossi's brief went well beyond the palace itself: he laid out a whole Empire-style ensemble around it, connecting a new square and a new street to the Grand Duke's name, with the palace as the compositional centre, flanked by two symmetrical wings - the Ladies-in-Waiting wing to the west and the Riding Hall wing to the east - and served by stables, a laundry house and a private garden running down to the Moika River.

After Michael Pavlovich's death the palace passed to his widow and then, in the second half of the 19th century, to Grand Duchess Catherine Mikhailovna, who lived there until her own death on 30 April 1894. It was her heirs' decision to sell the palace that put it, for the first time, on the market - and within a year that sale would end its life as a private residence altogether.

In January 1895 Emperor Nicholas II decided that the state should acquire the Mikhailovsky Palace rather than let it pass to a private buyer. On 13 April 1895 (25 April by the New Style calendar) he signed a decree founding a new institution, in his father's name: "The foundation of a special institution which will be entitled 'The Emperor Alexander III Russian Museum' and the assignment of the Mikhailovsky Palace with all its wings, services and the garden, specially acquired by the state for this purpose." Grand Duke George Mikhailovich became the museum's first director; Professor Mikhail Botkin headed the construction committee; the Academy of Arts architect Vasily Svinin carried out the conversion.

The change from ducal residence to public gallery was not cosmetic. The committee heightened doorways and passages on the lower floor, removed intercommunicating doors, stoves, fireplaces and mirrors that had no place in a museum, merged small private rooms into continuous exhibition halls, stripped out the wooden attic storeys, and built a new entrance vestibule while restoring the bas-reliefs above it. Where Rossi's original decoration served the new plan - the ceiling moldings and paintings on the piano nobile, the inlaid floors, some of the fireplaces - the committee kept it; where it did not, as in the old Dancing Room and the Big Theatre, only the room's original size and door positions survived the rebuilding, and new skylights meant filling in the windows entirely. The Committee's final inspection of the completed work took place on 28 February 1898, and the museum opened to the public the following month. It was, and remains, distinct in kind from its much larger neighbour: where the Hermitage collects internationally, the Russian Museum was founded to hold Russian art alone, and its opening collection was assembled from the Hermitage, the Alexander Palace and the Imperial Academy of Arts. After the 1917 revolution, nationalised private collections - including early Russian avant-garde painting - were added to it, reshaping what the museum could show of the 20th century.

A visitor arriving expecting a single building will need to recalibrate. The Mikhailovsky Palace, joined to the Benois Wing that was added onto it in 1919 to Leon Benois's design, is the largest and best-known part of the museum, but it is only the anchor of a wider complex spread across central Saint Petersburg, each part keeping its own address, its own opening hours and, in most cases, its own ticket. The Marble Palace on Millionnaya Street, built by Antonio Rinaldi in the 1770s and 1780s and altered by Alexander Bryullov in the 1840s, is a branch in its own right. So is St Michael's (Engineers') Castle, the moated former residence of Paul I on Sadovaya Street. So is the Stroganov Palace on Nevsky Prospekt, an 18th-century Rastrelli building used mainly for temporary shows of decorative art. The museum also administers Peter the Great's log cabin on the Petrovskaya Embankment, Peter I's Summer Palace, and two formal gardens - the Summer Garden and the Mikhailovsky Garden - as outdoor sculpture grounds attached to the main site. The practical consequence, visible on the museum's own booking site, is that a single day's ticket does not admit a visitor to more than one of these buildings; anyone planning to see both the Mikhailovsky Palace and, say, the Marble Palace is planning two separate visits.

The collection's chronological range is the museum's own case for itself. It opens with Old Russian icon painting: around 6,000 icons from the 12th to the 17th centuries, including a 12th-century Novgorod fragment known as The Angel with Golden Hair, one of the earliest and most reproduced objects in the museum's holdings. From there the permanent display in the Mikhailovsky Palace moves through 18th-century portraiture and academic painting into the 19th-century rooms that hold the paintings most visitors come to see: Karl Bryullov's The Last Day of Pompeii, Ivan Aivazovsky's The Ninth Wave, Ilya Repin's Barge Haulers on the Volga and his Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV, and Arkhip Kuindzhi's Moonlit Night on the Dnieper, a landscape famous enough in its own century that it was once exhibited alone, under a spotlight, behind a curtain. A separate permanent exhibition covers Russian folk art from the 17th to the 21st centuries, roughly 1,500 objects arranged chronologically across peasant and regional craft traditions.

The 20th century, largely housed in the Benois Wing, tells a different kind of story. The nationalisation of private collections after 1917 brought Suprematist and avant-garde painting into a museum that had opened in 1898 without any of it, including Kazimir Malevich's Suprematist compositions such as Black Circle and Red Square, alongside work by Wassily Kandinsky, Natalia Goncharova and Marc Chagall. Across the whole institution, secondary sources put total holdings above 400,000 objects spanning painting, sculpture, decorative art, drawing and folk craft, though the museum's own current English-language pages do not publish a headline figure for this research to confirm directly.

Not every recent chapter has been about acquisition. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was followed, within weeks, by a culture ministry moratorium on loans from Russian museums abroad, in force from 3 March 2022, and by Western institutions and the European Museum Forum suspending cooperation with Russian museums and museum professionals in turn - a freeze that cut off exactly the kind of international loan traffic a museum of this scale would ordinarily take part in.

Domestically, the museum drew sharper and more specific criticism the following year. In July 2023 the Russian Museum was due to open Klin Novikova (Novikov's Wedge), a retrospective of more than 80 works by the artist Timur Novikov and the New Academy circle he founded. The exhibition was fully mounted when, on 19 July, the day before its scheduled opening, newly appointed director Alla Manilova - a Kremlin-connected former deputy culture minister who had taken over the museum in April that year - cancelled the opening. The museum's press service blamed technical shortcomings: a lack of glass display cases for costumes, and too few works from the museum's own Novikov holdings. The show reopened a week later, on 26 July, running through 25 September, but not unchanged: a velvet phallus on a donkey costume from a Novikov theatrical production was covered, and a print by the artist Olga Tobreluts depicting Adam and Eve was withdrawn from the exhibition entirely over its nudity. Tobreluts called the museum's actions barbarism; the museum's own curator, Alexander Borovsky, told The Art Newspaper there was no political issue and that the changes were purely technical, noting that the Hermitage, the Tretyakov Gallery and the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art had all shown Novikov's work before without incident. Other commentators read the episode as part of a broader tightening of cultural censorship inside Russia since 2022. This publication records the episode because it happened at this museum, under its own director, and was reported with her institution named - not because it is unique to Russian museums, and not as a verdict on the individual works themselves.

Isolation from Western museums has not translated into empty galleries. The Art Newspaper's annual worldwide attendance survey recorded 3.6 million visitors to the Russian Museum in 2024, an increase of close to a quarter on the year before and roughly half again on 2019 attendance, placing the museum among the ten most-visited art museums on earth for that year - ahead of institutions such as Mexico City's National Anthropology Museum and level with the Hermitage itself, which recorded a similar 3.6 million but remained further below its own pre-pandemic, pre-war numbers. Later reporting put 2025 attendance above 5 million, more than double the museum's 2019 figure. The pattern reported across Russia's federal museums generally is the same: a fall in Western tourism after 2022, offset and then overtaken by domestic demand, with international air links to the West still curtailed but visitor numbers recovering regardless.

The Mikhailovsky Palace, the museum's main building and the one that holds the collection described above, keeps the same hours every open day: 10:00 to 20:00 on Monday and from Wednesday to Sunday, closed on Tuesdays. Tickets are sold online, by date and half-hour arrival slot, through the museum's own booking site rather than at a flat walk-up price; slots for popular routes are capped and can sell out, a constraint visible directly on the booking page rather than asserted by any guidebook. Independent travel guides recommend allowing at least half a day for the Mikhailovsky Palace alone, and given that the museum's other buildings are ticketed and timed separately, a visitor wanting to see more than one branch should plan for more than one visit. The museum publishes its own building-by-building accessibility ratings, covering entrances, internal routes, toilets and parking for each site, rather than a single blanket accessibility statement for the whole institution.

Visitors consistently rate the Russian Museum highly and describe it as a calmer, more manageable counterpart to the Hermitage a few streets away - a single coherent survey of Russian art from medieval icons to the 20th century, in a palace whose own decorated state rooms are part of the display. The most common practical complaint is not about the art itself but about scale and logistics: the museum is not one building but several separate palaces around the city, each keeping its own hours and usually its own ticket, and first-time visitors who plan for only the Mikhailovsky Palace often do not realise the Benois Wing, the Marble Palace, St Michael's Castle and the Stroganov Palace are ticketed and timed separately.