State Russian Museum guided tour

The State Russian Museum's main collections, housed in the splendid Mikhailovsky Palace, have served for over a century as a showcase of Russia's fine art traditions. Many of the artists whose work the museum displays, while known to all schoolchildren in Russia, are largely unknown internationally, and much of the subject-matter they depicted has a specific national resonance that can too easily be missed or misinterpreted by neophytes. A qualified tour guide can therefore be a huge advantage, bringing to life the wealth of art and history the Russian Museum can offer.

Russia's pictorial heritage dates back to the Byzantine schools of icon painting in the early middle ages, but only achieved true worldwide prominence at the turn of the 20th century, before largely fading back into international obscurity as the Soviet Union matured. The State Russian Museum can offer masterpieces from every period in the development of Russian art, but the weight of its collection comes from the 19th century, when Russian artists began to move away from slavish imitation of Western European fashions and create their own visual idioms, heavily influenced by and intertwined with the grand changes in Russian politics and society of the era.

It was a process that resulted in the extraordinary flowering of artistic talent in the first decades of the 20th century that produced artists of the caliber of Kandinsky, Chagall, and Malevich, amongst many others whose works are on display here. Your guide will take you through this extraordinary story and on into the art of the Soviet period, for which the Russian Museum works hard to a representative and engaging balance between the works of official artists and the artistic underground that flourished, especially in St. Petersburg/Leningrad, in the last decades of Soviet power.

Your guided tour will give insights into the often difficult lives of the artists, the major historical events depicted in many of the works, the history of the Russian Museum itself, and much more.

Itinerary and route details