Museumspeak, Russian Style

The State Hermitage Museum has just published on its website a defense of director Mikhail Piotrovsky. It is so ramblingly incoherent that its clumsy translation from Russian can only partly explain its muddled logic.

Originally published Aug. 10 in Rossiiskaya Gazeta (Russian Newspaper), "The Case of Piotrovsky" does make one thing clear---that the director will not leave his position voluntarily, in the wake of the scandal over thefts from the museum's collection:

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.

But weirdly defensive passages like the following do more to hurt Piotrovsky's professional image than to help it:

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.

The disordered diatribe, which never addresses the substantive issues raised by the Hermitage thefts, was authored by Julia Kantor, identified as "Advisor to the Director of the State Hermitage [Piotrovsky] and senior staff member of the museum." One has to assume it represents the official party line of the museum and its director.

And that's cause for serious concern.