Are Russian Museums Inherently Colonial?: The Hermitage's Oriental Arms and Armor Collection as a Case Study

• In Event: Museums: Virtual, Real, and Decolonized

Abstract

While enlightenment thought celebrated museums as sites for the dissemination of knowledge, recent scholarship has focused on their role in facilitating and justifying colonial domination by depicting non-Western peoples as culturally inferior and valorizing their subjugation. The Hermitage’s Oriental Arms and Armor collection seems to be a perfect example of this phenomenon: created to represent Tsarist power, its core includes weapons obtained as spoils of war in campaigns against Islamic polities in the Middle East, Caucasus, and Central Asia. Unlike its Western European peers, the Hermitage does not support repatriation and the Russian Federation today explicitly uses its imperial past to justify wars of conquest. However, recent studies by Maya Jasanoff and others have complicated the relationship between museums and colonial conquest. The Hermitage deserves to be reevaluated in this light as well.

A close analysis of the Oriental Arms and Armor collection’s provenance, history, organization, and display reveals a reflection of the complicated relationship between the Russian state and the Muslim world. Most of its objects were obtained from rival empires with their own traditions of conquest. While explicit violence certainly played a role in the collection’s creation, so did diplomatic gift exchange, conspicuous consumption, aristocratic self-styling, and antiquarian zeal. Many objects entered the collection through the efforts of non-Europeans, and many are culturally hybrid objects that question the very dichotomy between “East” and “West.” Today, the collection valorizes Russia’s colonial past but also argues for the Russia’s own hybrid Eurasian identity.

Author

• Daniil Kabotyanski, Indiana U Bloomington