Over 240,000 items missing in Russian museums
English.news.cn 2010-09-08 20:34:46 FeedbackPrintRSS
MOSCOW, Sept. 8 (Xinhua) -- Russian museums were missing more than 242,000 items, only 24,500 of which were reported as stolen, an expert from the Cultural Ministry said Wednesday.
According to Lyubov Molchanova, another 219,000 items were absent for unknown reasons, with mismanagement as likely a culprit as thieves.
Russia's Interior and Cultural Ministries were currently conducting a joint audit of the national museums' treasures after three major robberies happened in the largest museum, the Hermitage, in St. Petersburg.
They checked 1,881 museums, responsible for 73 million items.
The expert told a museums conference that some missing items might be actually still stocked in the museums but "just had been forgotten".
She referred to disorderly work and mismanagement in the museums as a reason for the mess.
Molchanova complained that some items had been transferred to governors and state institutions, who had refused to return them.
"Museum workers often are too humble to resist the officials' demands," said the expert as quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency.
Editor: Deng Shasha
This article was posted on English.News.cn on 2010-09-08
This article was sadly not surprising. The sheer number of missing artifacts is shocking, because that many items should never go missing, but it is not surprising. There are 73,000,000 objects under the care of Russian Museums and only 242,000 objects are missing. That is less than 1%.
Yes the number is large and somewhat overwhelming, but we have to keep it in perspective. I am willing to guess that most museums, after going through an inventory like the Russian museums just did would find that they were missing at least 1% of their objects.
I do not condone this, but I do want us to put this article in perspective. We, as readers, should not take away from this article the idea that the Russians have not been caring for their objects. This is not true. There are many factors involved when an object is missing. The most horrifying is theft, but more often than not the object was simply missplaced, and is actually still inside the museum. What we should take away from this article is that we as an overall community should place more importance on the preservation of our cultural heritage.
The article said "that some items had been transferred to governors and state institutions, who had refused to return them." out of the 219,000 objects missing, but not reported stolen, a good chunk of them would not be missing if we as a culture placed more pressure on these political figures to return their objects once the period of the loan was completed.
