ST. PETERSBURG.- The Case of Piotrovsky- The concepts of "honor" and "dishonor" weighed in the balance. An article by Julia Kantor, Advisor to the Director of the State Hermitage and senior staff member of the museum.

When Mikhail Piotrovsky was awarded one of the most prestigious awards in the world, the Order of the Legion of Honor, someone asked him how he would wear it. Without thinking twice, the Director of the Hermitage said, apparently without a touch of humor, "honorably."

Everything that is happening in the Hermitage these days is very closely linked with the antithesis of honor and dishonor. The reputation of Russia's main museum and symbol of the country's statehood has been sullied. People in the uniforms of the police and court investigators are carrying out their scrupulous and low-key work while items that had disappeared from the museum collections are anonymously deposited in front of the local offices of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and FSB. An unbelievably cheeky and primitive theft has burst into the lives of the museum community. And naturally it has had much broader resonance, as reports on the "Hermitage crime" have appeared in the federal news shows day after day, even pushing aside coverage of the Israeli-Lebanese conflict.

In keeping with traditions, people look for an underlying political theme in a criminal affair, the idea being that if crimes like this go on, they serve someone's interests. Immediately the public bet-making apparatus kicks in: will they remove Piotrovsky or not? A variation on this theme is: will Piotrovsky resign or not? The answer to this "variation" seems to be evident. Resigning from the Hermitage after all that has happened would mean washing one's hands of it, making a gesture to save face, while at the same time forever losing the right to respond to the vital questions honorably. What this means is that the question of Piotrovsky's voluntarily resigning is strictly rhetorical. As regards his involuntary departure, it is not for us to say. Nor is it for us to either defend or accuse him. What we can do is just ponder the situation.

One can enumerate the Russian and foreign regalia that Mikhail Piotrovsky has acquired. One can publish a list of his scientific writings in the area of Oriental studies, and a separate article would be required for that purpose. One can recall that he was the one to defend the right of Russian museums to earn and spend funds from outside the state budgetary allocations, and that he was the one to "mobilize" his colleagues in the defense of architectural monuments against wholesale privatization, suggesting instead a clear way of saving them. One may remember that it was Piotrovsky who took over the museum's leadership in the early 1990s, when, just as after the 1917 Revolution, there was talk of the economic justification of selling museum treasures, and he opposed this threatening catastrophe. One may also recollect the splendid Hermitage exhibition programs which have reached literally from the taiga to the Atlantic, how Piotrovsky has been equally at home in Buckingham Palace and in a nomad's tent on the steppe. One may also mention the museum's impeccable reputation in domestic and international business circles, where collaboration with the Hermitage is considered to be very beneficial. But such an emotional enumeration would bear a knowingly funereal and justificatory character. This is not our purpose.

The point today is quite different. Piotrovsky stands out against the general mass of people. Piotrovsky speaks a dozen foreign languages fluently. This arouses jealousy, or to put it more directly, it arouses envy among those who suffer from hidden inferiority complexes. Piotrovsky has a flawed past: he comes from the nobility. He keeps his distance, and this is a reason for distrust. Finally, he has entree into the Kremlin offices and, so they say, is friendly with the authorities: this can be a pretext for reproaching him for being servile or venal. Piotrovsky is in fact no malcontent and takes no stands on issues outside professional principles. By the way, the last time there was talk of retiring the Director of the Hermitage was quite recently, when there were attempts to turn the Palace Square into a cinema circus.

In our country like no other people know how easy it is to use a well publicized criminal affair to serve large-scale political objectives. A theft in the Hermitage can truly be a cause for adopting tough measures in museum management and well beyond to change the system of interrelationships between the State and Culture. One hopes that such measures will not be blatantly police-like. It is a bitter thing when thieves appear amidst museum staff. It is still worse when people strive to make a career for themselves out of thievery. There are not so many people who would like to take over as Director of the Hermitage: the responsibility is too great. But there are more people who would like to call attention to themselves, to be noticed for their "just anger" over what has happened, and one sees this in the open rejoinders outside and inside museum circles. The old Soviet formula is still operative: if you betray someone in time, it means you foresaw what was unfolding. Sixty years ago the sad, well-known decrees of Zhdanov with respect to the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad were adopted. At that time people persecuted Zoshchenko and Akhmatova, who were deemed unsuitable and inexpedient. Moreover, they were persecuted from within the writers' profession. That was only the beginning and soon afterwards the persecutors themselves became victims of the system, and the State, which had tested the intelligentsia for lice, so to speak, was satisfied with the experiment and continued with its prosecution of the so-called "Leningrad affair," etc.

History has a habit of repeating itself. We have already seen the tragedy. Do we have to wait for the farce?

What do those responsible for cleaning up the stained uniforms want: average guy middle managers heading up a huge corporation which combines world-scale treasure troves and super-modern technologies? Or, perhaps, it is more acceptable to have an art historian in civilian clothes? No doubt it would be possible to find a decent and convenient candidate for director of the State Hermitage. But Piotrovsky occupies a place not only in the museum itself, but also in Russian cultural space. And no order from on high can deprive him of that place.