Nikolai Tretyakov: We have a lot of work underway and we are managing overall, even in a situation where everyone is telling us that we have to earn money if we want to get financing. Fortunately, money is not the only thing. There was a time when we lived without any funding from the state at all. We managed to do a lot on our own money, looked after the park and so on. In this respect, I have positive words for Valentina Ivanovna [Governor of St Petersburg Valentina Matviyenko]. With her arrival in 2004–2005 the situation changed for the better. We began getting money to pay wages and so on, but there is still very little money for restoration work – only nine million [rubles] this year.
Dmitry Medvedev: Let’s talk about this situation.
First of all, Marina Alexandrovna [Chief Curator Marina Flit], I want to congratulate you most sincerely once again. We agreed when you were at the Kremlin that I would come to visit. The Pavlovsk Park and Palace are special places to me (every person has their own special places), and I spent quite a lot of time here. Even compared to the 1970s, when I used to come here (and a huge amount of work was done then to restore the palace and park) everything looks a lot better now. It makes you realize how much work has gone into this and how much effort has been made despite the rather modest financing. The financing has indeed always been modest. Even during the Soviet years, when everything went as planned, funding was not fantastic. In the 1990s, the whole funding situation went into collapse in general. But as you rightly said, Nikolai Sergeyevich, a museum can always find its own niche. Pavlovsk has always been a favourite place for people from St Petersburg. A huge number of people come from the city just to relax, and then of course there are also all the visitors from elsewhere in Russia and from abroad.
We were just on the Amstel in Amsterdam, and they have done well of course, opening this large branch of the Hermitage there, but we must not forget about our museums. What we just saw in Amsterdam is actually an excellent example of how to work and how to raise money. They have set up their own endowment fund, and this has made it possible to activate work to such a degree.
I think that endowments of this sort should be established for all of our big museums. Pavlovsk is one of the jewels in our crown of course, and so this kind of endowment is what we need. The crisis has slowed us down a bit perhaps in this work, but really, every museum should have something of this sort.
We will discuss too how to provide budget funding and how best to sort out the situation with private investment. There should be both public and private funding sources after all. And we will discuss in general the next steps to take.
I am very happy to be here and I congratulate you once again.
<…>