Dramatic images of St Petersburg’s ransacked Winter Palace after the Bolshevik Revolution are going on show in London for one weekend only. Calvert 22 Foundation, which supports contemporary art from Russia and Eastern Europe, is exhibiting around 20 photographs (enlarged reproductions of the original prints) from the archives of the State Hermitage Museum, which has occupied the Baroque former residence of the Russian tsars since October 1917. The partnership underpins a year-long season of events marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution.
The display traces the rapid evolution of the palace from the centre of celebrations for the ruling Romanov dynasty’s 300th anniversary in 1913 to a symbol of the destruction of the old regime. The still-new medium of photography captured the meeting of Russia’s moderate interim government in the library of Tsar Nicholas II after the February Revolution, the preparation of works of art for evacuation and the all-female battalion that defended the palace against Lenin’s Bolsheviks. A number of the prints only entered the Hermitage archives in the 1990s as a gift from the widow of the author P.F. Gubchevsky, who wrote the museum’s historic guidebook.
The Museum After the Revolution opens today (until Sunday 30 April) as a visual counterpoint to a conference of the same name co-organised by the foundation and the Hermitage (28-29 April). With a keynote address by the museum’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, and panel discussions on topics such as the legacy of the imperial jeweller Carl Fabergé, Soviet museum policy in the 1920s and the collective silence around the Prague Spring in 1968, the event explores the impact of the Russian Revolution on museum collections across the former Soviet bloc.
