The answer to this and other questions was sought by the participants of the Russkiy Mir Historical-Cultural Forum in Novgorod. The meeting of scholars from 12 countries representing 140 academic, museum and restoration organizations began with an unusual request.

“We are building the M11 highway here,” said Sergei Mitin, Governor of the Novgorod Region,” and we found a boat or ladya from the 15th century. The boat, I can assure you, is one of kind. We would like be to find out about this. And also, please tell me, how should it be preserved? Can we turn it into a museum on water? I would even ask broader question: there in the swamp we discovered a GAZ automobile from 1939. It sat in the water for 70 years and then started up and ran like it was no time had passed. What should we do with such things? Do you have technologies or recommendations for how to preserve such pieces of the past? Something tells me that the right combination of the past and the present is what’s needed to ensure a prosperous future.” 

Gadget culture 

The governor seemed to have hit on something. He was followed by Vladimir Gusev, director of the world-famous Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.

“Before you stands a steward whose museum has 152 virtual branches in Russia and across the world,” said Vladimir Gusev. “In London, Thessaloniki, Kharkov… And just a short time ago I was pleased, when museum curators came up to me and strictly warned: ‘God forbid a computer be set up in my stock room.’ I must admit that I was glad to hear such ultimatums. Like many other managers, I was afraid that computer networks would steal visitors from us and put up all our special collections for everyone to see. Now the same curators, representatives of the elder generation, come to me with different demands: ‘How long does one have to wait? When will you install new software?’” 

With this Gusev set the tone for the forum and its key focus: the creation of new informational and virtual space in the system of museums and restoration centers – that is the essence of the transformations now underway. The aim of these transformations is not to turn the museums into entertainment but rather to make them engaging panoramic systems which are capable, if necessary, of replacing excursion guides.

“Of course, live speech is also needed, even if with pauses and mistakes,” Gusev is convinced. “It’s clear that culture will never fit into a gadget, but we should give people the right of choice. Thanks to gadgets, some people may want to expand their horizons and learn more about the cultural heritage.”

Quite a short time ago the research workers of Peter the Great Anthropology and Ethnography Museum, better known as the Kunstkamera, Russia’s first museum, were harassed with two questions: “Where’re the freaks?” and “Where’s the exit?”

Yulia Kupina, deputy director of the Kunstkamera, recalls those recent times with slight irony: “We are not just an academic center; we do fundamental research on human culture, and some representatives of humanity, after two compulsory questions may also ask the perpetual third one: ‘Where is the toilet?’ This helped us realize that we should solve our reputational and academic tasks by addressing such questions instead of evading them.”

Kunstkamera has fine toilets now – any four-star hotel could be envious. And the museum’s attendance is now also great. While an outflow of visitors was observed from 1993 to 1997, starting in 1998, when the museum first launched its presence in the internet, the numbers of visitors has grown steadily. Quite indicative is the fact that tentatively since 2003 the number of museum goers has been growing due to virtual visitors who come here on their feet after viewing the museum site, its touch-screen kiosks and videos promoting both the remarkable hits and little-known exhibits. The annual attendance reaches half a million. Interestingly enough, 514,000 people visited the brick-and-mortar museum and 485,000 visited it virtually. The number of virtual visitors to Kunstkamera is forecast to surpass the number of real visitors already in 2015. The museum takes pride in the fact that from a third to half of all virtual visitors become “real” visitors. The number of in-person visitors clearly tends to grow due to those who were earlier turned off by the museum’s academic environment: the children of preschools and elementary schools, visitors of social networks and chats.

Nevertheless, the Kunstkamera has a difficult relationship with social networks. A year ago the museum posted in the Internet its exposition “Humanity’s Photo Album” and almost immediately started receiving emails. Somebody recognized her great grandma, others – the lost photograph of their great grandpa’s family in the interior of a patrimonial house. Still others saw the face of their grandfather for the first time. And those photographs both in the virtual space and in the physical museum overshadowed the traditional museum hit: those very famous ‘freaks’ from Peter’s time. Now people have started lining up to see personal photos – of prerevolutionary officers and Cossack, harvesters and coachmen, peasants in the field and workers at the factory, the kulaks and repressed individuals of the 1930s and 1940s.

Recently the museum also received two copies of the letter from Grozny – one by email and another by regular mail – with the entreaty to send a copy of the photograph of their grandfather who was imprisoned in 1944, because his family was also exiled to Kazakhstan and did not have any pictures of their ancestor. Both letters ended identically: “Can we buy this photo at any price?”

“We made a copy and sent it free of charge,” continues Ms. Kupina. “This is a socially significant line of our virtual work. However, we do not plan to step up our activity in social networks, because we do not know what we could do there. It’s clear to us that it won’t be problematic to find 5,000-10,000 subscribers in social networks, but what should we do with them next? To date we’ve been happy about their good disposition towards us and we could meet their requests and help them with catalogues, contacts or send them their family photographs. Yet a more full-scale contact is possible only within the walls of the museum, for such is our nature.”

This is how “The Kunstkamera of the Third Millennium” positions itself: from database to knowledge base, then to the interaction between knowledge bases, with basic virtual knowledge coming first, followed by fundamental real knowledge.

At the Tretyakov Art Gallery the question “Where is the exit?” also became irrelevant in the early 2000s, when benches and armchairs for relaxation were set up in its numerous halls, whereas earlier these had been reproached as an element of “indecency” in the temple of culture. A bit later the appearance of an “itinerant” grand piano and sofas now in the Vrubel hall and now in the place of a new exposition added more hospitality to the once austere academic museum.

“With the appearance of relaxation spots our rethinking of the visitors’ idea about blockbusters commenced,” says Ekaterina Voronina, research fellow with the Tretyakov Art Gallery in Moscow. “No, nothing has changed dramatically, since people are still crowded in front of Pushkin’s portrait or The Appearance of the Messiah to the People. However, after we noticed that where benches are set up spectators do not only sit on them, but also take more time than usual to examine the masterpieces which were not so lucky in terms of promotion, we altered the strategy of the information-virtual space.”

Now at the Tretyakov Art Gallery it is possible to study in detail not only the masterpieces featured prominently in school textbooks, albums and reproductions but also the paintings that are often missed by visitors to the gallery, where they want first to see what they have heard or read about.

The gallery’s website recently presented a new video: “The Vision of Adolescent Bartholomew” by Mikhail Nesterov. The sound track is just phenomenal: birds’ signing coupled with palpitation of the leaves and grass. It immediately breathes life to the static scene and captures imagination. The video boasts more than a thousand hits a day and more than 45,000 a month. As a result, an unusually large audience gathers near this work, primarily young people.

“For several years we’ve had no questioning of the need for these video presentations, although in the beginning there were both doubts and opposition,” says Ekaterina Voronina. “They give a general idea of the painter, epoch and masterpiece, kindling the desire to visit the museum upon examining some fragments. By and large, new highs are reached through individual fragments as the new space for the Russian historic-cultural tradition is being created.” 

Co-organizer of the Russkiy Mir Historic-Cultural Forum Tatiana Tsarevskaya, chief research fellow at the Novgorod State United Museum Reserve, strived to conduct the work of almost all academic sections at the Novgorod Kremlin and then requested that the work be wrapped up with excursion of the Kremlin and another famous architectural ensemble of Novgorod – Yaroslav’s Court – across the river.

“This objective is simple,” explains Tsarevskaya, “visually bringing home an obvious thing to professionals: architectural monuments are an integral part of the Earth’s eco-culture. It’s time to consider them not as decorations, but as an integral part of the living environment. Sounds simple, but the task seems awesome unless we change the strategy: only after we replace the current strategy of putting historic monuments to other uses with the strategy of tending to them and their harmonious blending with our environment will it be possible to talk about their safety and long-term conservation for posterity.”

According to many participants of the forum, the introduction of a system of climatic, ecological, technological, social and urban-planning monitoring of the cultural heritage could become a milestone on the way to changing strategy. To date this has been missing and now it seems to be a virtual hurdle, but without it conservation of the historic-cultural space merely utopian.

“We hope that based on the results of our forum, discussions and exchange of experience, which served as both a real and a virtual veche with our foreign colleagues, a new common space will appear for the Russian historical and cultural traditions of Russkiy Mir, which now are already indelibly connected with high technologies,” said Sergei Bogdanov, Deputy Executive Director of the Russkiy Mir Foundation.