Personality of the year: Mikhail Piotrovsky, director, State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

APOLLO's personality of the year is individual of the titans of the museum world. Since 1992 Mikhail Piotrovsky has weathered the years of perestroika and the dissolution of the Soviet Union while presiding above a museum that has not single remained intact but is also growing--a fresh building has permitted public access to the museum's keep collections for the first time. below his guidance, the Hermitage has established satellite galleries in London, Las Vegas and Amsterdam, and will shortly open another, in Mantua. He talked to Joanna Pitman about the challenges of his piece of work the impact of money from Russia's novel billionaires and his plans for a museum of twentieth hundred art.

Standing in the grand, panelled antechamber of the office of the director of the Hermitage, individual gets a strong impression of the power held by means of its occupant, Professor Mikhail Piotrovsky. Curators shift in for a scholarly meeting and without again; potential sponsors are ushered in and out; international museum directors arrive to discuss what they might gather from the Hermitage's three and a half million works for temporary display abroad; supplicants and petitioners draw near and go. Inside, sitting at a herculean mahogany desk used by Tsar Alexander III and beneath a portrait of Catherine the Great, Piotrovsky races the show with passion, panache and a great deal of determination.

Not lengthy ago, when the effects of perestroika began to be felt it direct the eyeed from the West as if a certain quantity of of the grand cultural institutions of the former Soviet Union might have difficulties in surviving. Financial crisis strike one as beinged to be engulfing everything. on the other hand under Piotrovsky, the Hermitage has not alone survived. It has come without fighting, and it is more significant upon the international cultural stage than it was before. Since he became director in 1992 Piotrovsky (who speaks eleven languages fluently) has make opened permanent exhibition spaces in London, Las Vegas and, greatest in quantity recently, in 2004, Amsterdam. A branch is planned to unclose in August next year in Kazan, the capital of the rich mahometan independent republic of Tatarstan, more [i]or[/i] less five hundred miles east of Moscow by and by after that, another offshoot, a midst of scholarship and education, will unclose in Mantua, with the possibility of exhibitions there each two years. There are also ongoing talks with the Japanese about a branch of the museum in Hiroshima.

I ask Piotrovsky what he considers the greatest achievement of his directorship for a like reason far. Modestly, he begins by means of saying that his greatest pleasure is the fact that the Hermitage has simply survived a real difficult few years. "1 am self-conscious of the fact that the Hermitage is still living according to its traditions. It hasn't become too present it hasn't changed much. We've managed to retain the old traditions going and we've kept the spirit of the museum intact. In more [i]or[/i] less ways this is the solitary ninteenth-century museum left in the world.'

If you think of all the slick twenty-first hundred extensions, redevelopments and modernisations that have changed the faces of the other big museums of the world, in Paris, novel York and London, it is warming to diocese how little the Hermitage has changed. The galleries are true little altered since the last major hang in the 1930 Curators still gather in the scruffy staff corridors around the advanced in years ash pots, to smoke, argue, name poetry and share their bread and cheese. The senior specialists still have to leave the mark of their personal seal in plasticine when locking high-security doors. In atmosphere, the place still mixes the imperial splendour of its chandeliers and malachite vases with a considerably dilapidated human dimension.

'The Hermitage is single of the biggest museums in the world', says Piotrovsky. 'Well, the Louvre is actually bigger through a few square metres, on the contrary that means nothing. Emotionally speaking, the Hermitage is the greatest museum in the world. Rationally speaking, it is single of a small family of great universal museums, the colossal monster museums which are relics of the imperial period of history. We all have large collections to hold and conserve, we have a what one is bound [i]or[/i] under obligation to do to show their holdings to the public and we also have a what one ought to do to study them. In the Hermitage we have five for cent of our holdings upon display, but we now have a novel six-storey building for storage in which everything is accessible. You can purchase a ticket and go there to diocese our quantities of furniture and carriages and smooth huge Turkish tents, all station up. If you want to diocese our one million coins and the 500000 works upon paper and all the medals and archaeological artefacts, you can sec them all. It is all accessible, and that, I think, is an achievement.'

Piotrovsky does not contradict that he still struggles simply to hold the museum open. 'It was a real fight just to hold fast everything floating during Perestroika. We had times when the conduct stopped paying what they had promised, when circulating medium earmarked for us was wearied on other causes. It has been a tough battle. We've had to use threats and we've had to learn from colleagues abroad in other museums about in what manner to generate our own currency At one point we were generating 60 for cent of our budget ourselves. Now the figure is 40 for cent. I've had to fight hard above the last few years.'