The State Russian Museum, one of the largest museum of fine art in Europe and the largest museum of Russian art in the World (along with the State Tretyakov Gallery), is located in the center of St. Petersburg, in the architectural complex of Arts Square. The museum occupies four different buildings: the Mikhailovski Palace, an outstanding monument of Petersburg architecture (1819-1825, architect K.I. Rossi), the Mikhailovsky Castle, the Stroganovsky Palace and the Marble Palace.

Despite the intense cultural life in Petersburg, then the capital of Russia, there was no state museum devoted to national art until the end of the nineteenth century. Some works by Russian masters were held in the Hermitage (which for a long time had the character of a palace collection of the imperial family); a few were in the Academy of Arts, where there were mainly works by its students, but most were in numerous private collections. For this reason, the establishment of the Russian Museum was an important event in the artistic life of the city.

The Russian Museum (first named the Russian Museum of the Emperor Alexander III) was established in 1895. In order to have a place for the museum, the Treasury acquired the Mikhailovski Palace, and its interior was partially redone (architect V.E. Svinin). The core of the museum collection was paintings by native masters from the Hermitage collection (which then comprised only eighty works), paintings from the Academy of Arts, the Alexander Palace in the Tsarskoe Selo, and from other palace holdings. A large portrait collection assembled by A.B. Lobanov-Rostovskii was also acquired.

The Museum opened to the public in March 1898. New departments appeared in the following years: ethnography in 1902 and history in 1913, although their exhibits were handed over to other museums in 1934. During the first ten years of its existence, the Museum doubled its art holdings and gained wide popularity. By 1912 museum attendance reached almost 220,000 visitors, which surpassed annual attendance to the Hermitage. From 1914 to 1917, during the course of World War I and the 1917' October Revolution, the Museum was closed and some of the exhibits evacuated.

A decree from the Council of the People's Commissars on October 5, 1918, deter-mined the proper way to protect and register these works of art and antiquity. Na-tionalized private art collections and holdings of abolished organizations that passed through the specially established state commissions and the State Museum Fund found their way into museums. During the first decade of Soviet rule, the art fund of the Russian Museum increased several times; work in the Museum was supervised by the Museum Council, which included important representatives of the art community of Petrograd.

In the 1920s the Museum embarked on collecting the newest and the most contempo-rary in painting. The growth of holdings led to the differentiation of objects by period and type and to the creation of new museum subdivisions. Thus, in 1923 the department of decorative and applied arts came into being, in 1926 the department of current trends (which later became the department of Soviet art), and in 1937 the department of folk art. In the 19305, the Museum rose to the level of the leading museum in the country. Within its walls the staff pursued many different activities in the areas of exhibitions, teaching, and scholarship.

During the years of the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) and the 900-Day Siege of Leningrad, the Russian Museum endured difficult trials. Its surroundings were hit by fire and incendiary bombs; the building was left without water; heat, or windows; the Benois wing was badly damaged; and the staff perished of hunger and shelling. Those who lived, however, carried on their museum work and heroically saved many of the art treasures by evacuating them deep into the interior of the country. In July 1944 an exhibition of works by artists from the Leningrad Front was held in several halls of the Museum. (Fifteen thousand people attended the exhibition.) Another special exhibi-tion commemorated the 100th birthday of Ilya Repin. On May 9,1946, the halls of the Mikhailovski Palace displayed the first postwar exhibition of Russian art. In 1949, fol-lowing the restoration of the damaged wing, the whole museum resumed its work.

In the 1950s, construction in the Museum included rebuilding the gallery that linked the two wings and building a new lecture complex. As a result of a general reinstallation carried out during the 1950s, works from every division of the Museum's holdings were shown for the first time. Today the State Russian Museum contains works of Russian painting, sculpture (among the richest collections in the Russia), graphics (the most comprehensive in the country), decorative and applied arts, and folk art. The total number of objects is about 420,000.

The State Russian Museum is one of the key scholarly/artistic entities in the Russia engaged both in extensively teaching about, exhibiting, and researching works, and in museum consultation. Annual attendance to the Museum approaches 1.5 million people, the number of tours through the exhibition halls nears eleven thousand, and the number of lectures presented by the museum staff is about 2,000 per year. Scholarly works by the museum's staff are published in various special editions, such as "Reports" on collections of works by theme and exhibition catalogues.

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