[MSN] Emergency Meeting Held for Russian Museums

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

Emergency Meeting Held for Russian Museums

By Galina Stolyarova
Staff Writer

The Presidium of Russia’s Museum Union is holding an emergency meeting in St. Petersburg on Monday and Tuesday to discuss the security and preservation of the most valuable art collections across Russia.

At the meeting on Monday, Mikhail Shvydkoi, head of Russia’s Agency for Culture and Cinematography, called for the creation of a full electronic catalogue of Russia’s vast museum resources.

Shvydkoi welcomed President Vladimir Putin’s initiative to form a commission to review and audit the collections of Russia’s museums. The commission, to include representatives of the Interior Ministry, the Culture Ministry, the security services and other state organizations, is due to start work on Sept. 1.

“The review will help to dispel a recent vicious myth about all museum directors and curators being thieves,” Shvydkoi told reporters on Monday. “The audit has to be carried out at high speed and completed within the next 15-30 years.”

Seventeen of the 221 artworks that were stolen from the State Hermitage Museum have been returned since their theft was officially reported on Aug.1.

Many of the items were recovered following anonymous tip-offs detailing where they had been left, usually near police headquarters.

It remains unclear who is behind the tip-off and whether they are coming from a single source.

St. Petersburg police arrested the son and husband of Hermitage curator Larisa Zavadskaya, who died of a heart attack at her desk in October. Her death came at the beginning of an inspection of her department which eventually exposed the absence of the works.

Since his arrest, Zavadskaya’s husband Nikolai has changed his evidence several times. Originally, he claimed he had not known the items were stolen, saying that he took them to antique dealers at the request of his wife who had told him she had received the works as gifts from friends.

Now Zavadsky, a 54-year-old history teacher at the Lesgaft Academy of Physical Culture admits having always been aware of the illegal provenance of the items.

The third suspect, local antiques dealer Maxim Shepel, who was found to have purchased one of the stolen items — a 19th-century silver chalice — has been undergoing treatment in a psychiatric ward at the city’s Gaaza regional hospital since Aug.10.

Shepel’s lawyer, Andrei Pavlov, said on Monday that he has not been able to visit his client at the hospital owing to restrictions imposed by his doctors. “Since my client was delivered to the hospital, I have been learning about his condition from his doctor,” Pavlov said. “Mr. Shepel’s mental condition is severe, and neither myself or the investigators are allowed into the ward.”

Shortly after his arrest last week, Shepel was reported to have had a nervous breakdown. While in prison, the antiques dealer also sustained a severe, possibly self-inflicted, eye wound. The circumstances of the accident have not yet been established.

Pavlov said Shepel had pleaded innocent, and maintained that the chalice was purchased legally, from an antiques shop at 13 Ulitsa Lenina.

The Hermitage’s management has found itself under fierce criticism over the past two weeks. Critics have expressed their outrage at the scale of a theft, which appears to have been carried out over a number of years, as well as at the Hermitage’s loose internal security system and lack of control over both inventories and curators. The museum’s electronic catalogue covers less than 10 percent of its vast collection which boasts over 3 million items. The museum lacks photographs of many of the items that have gone missing.

On Saturday, NTV television broadcasted an interview with Moscow collector Vladimir Studenikin, who handed a precious 19th-century silver chalice to the Russian Board for the Preservation of Cultural Valuables. Studenikin’s firm, Moscow-based Orthodox Antiques, had purchased the item from Maxim Shepel.

Denouncing the Hermitage management, the art dealer said:

“If anything this extraordinary happened in the past, either before the [1917] Revolution, or in the Soviet era, the museum manager whose organization found itself in such a shameful situation would have shot himself or hung himself using his scarf,” the collector remarked, hinting at the director of the Hermitage Mikhail Piotrovsky’s noted habit of wearing a scarf, weather conditions notwithstanding.

Mikhail Piotrovsky received an official reprimand from the Culture Ministry on Friday, but his position remains secure.

Speaking to reporters in Moscow last week Mikhail Shvydkoi said he had no intention of replacing Piotrovsky.

Piotrovsky’s reaction to calls for his departure has been adamant.

“I am not going to resign, do not waste your time waiting,” Piotrovsky told reporters last week. “Theft is happening in major foreign museums as well, for example, in the Louvre, and nobody resigns.”

At the Russia’s Museums’ Union on Monday, Piotrovsky apologized to his colleagues for the embarrassing theft. “It is a very unpleasant subject but we have to discuss it,” he said. “I hope that the scale of the reaction and the commotion the case has caused will help to assess and investigate the situation objectively.”

http://www.times.spb.ru