This book grew out of a chance conversation in 2011 between the author and Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage Museum, who saw in this French social scientist an ideal candidate for mining new insights about his institution (xi). Between 2012 and 2015, Vincent Antonin Lépinay and his students at the European University in St. Petersburg (EUSP) were granted unprecedented access to the spaces, contents, and staff of the Hermitage, an institution historically closed off to outsiders, yet offering “a magnified glimpse of the way museums work worldwide” (240). Drawing on dozens of interviews with staff throughout the museum, Lépinay has used the methodologies of economic anthropology, media studies, and organizational theory to fashion a refreshingly unfamiliar picture of the Hermitage and its inhabitants. Bypassing conventional myth-making and high-culture narratives, he shows instead the everyday functioning of the museum, from the storage areas and restoration studios to the galleries. In the process, he reveals how the institution operates as a “cultural laboratory”; its unique ecosystem and ethos producing its own kind of art historical knowledge.

For Lépinay, understanding the Hermitage's unique culture starts with its tumultuous history. Beginning as the art collections assembled by the Russian emperors and empresses, and first systematized by German art historians in the late Imperial period, the museum's holdings were massively expanded by the nationalization of property after the 1917 Revolution and again with the repatriation of looted cultural patrimony after World War II. Now numbering some 2.5 million objects, the collections have yet to be fully systematized or documented, and they remain under the legal care of individual keepers, who exercise proprietary control over them. The museum has also suffered traumas that continue to color its combined aura of privilege and isolation, nurturing a sense that the museum is “surrounded with enemies, both real and imagined” (248). The forced sale of masterworks abroad in the early 1930s, the threat to the collections during the Leningrad Siege, and four decades of Cold War politics have fostered a culture of multiple paradoxes and tensions. Uniquely privileged among Soviet institutions as a national treasury, the museum's imperial and foreign treasures were seen as “toxic material” by the Soviet regime, valued abroad but reviled at home. Hermitagers found a sanctuary from the brutalities of Soviet life within its walls and devoted themselves to protecting its treasures, but the need for protection also fostered a culture of secrecy in which oral communication was safer than written documents for public consumption. Lépinay's interviews depict an institutional culture where direct contact with the art object trumps all other forms of knowledge, and where enforced isolation from the wider world of professional art history has required generations of Hermitagers to develop their own self-contained systems. This culture of exclusivity and confinement has persisted into the post-Soviet era, even as the museum has earned a prominent place among world-class museums with a vibrant exhibition program, innovative outreach programs, and a key role in the St. Petersburg tourist economy.

Of the many Hermitagers interviewed for his project, the author focuses on those responsible for the creation and dissemination of scientific knowledge on the collections: the keepers, researchers, restorers, methodologists (essentially, museum educators), and guides. The keepers exert a monopoly over the funds entrusted to them, controlling access and knowledge through direct contact with the art object and a value placed on oral communication rather than archives and written records that can be made public. The restorers, whose role became central after the turmoil of WWII, maintain a conservative ethos of “nostalgic modesty” that privileges retaining the patina of the past over restoring an imagined original. A fascinating chapter lays bare the hierarchical system of tour guides who occupy “front stage in a collective performance,” relaying the knowledge produced by the army of curators and researchers behind the façade of the galleries (191). Along the way, there are fascinating behind-the-scenes insights into the documentation and categorization of objects as they enter and move through the museum, the professional training and mobility of individual Hermitage staff, and the consequences of digital access to the collections as a way of dealing with the Hermitage's “state of excess” (a bare 10 percent of its collections are made available to the public).

The book's title captures the author's central aim “to make … a reading of an organization through its technologies of memory” (8), using western research methods to illuminate “one of the most prolific manufacturers of the Russian past” (12). In penetrating the walls and the silence that have long enveloped the inner workings of the Hermitage, Lépinay offers an exemplary and paradigm-shifting study of how institutions produce and shape culture.