Russia’s Museum Treasures Face Perils of Fire, Nature : Culture: Conditions at the Hermitage, libraries and archives are dire. Conference seeks preservation.

Original Pushkin manuscripts, Picasso paintings and priceless historical documents are endangered by disastrous conditions at the Hermitage and other famous St. Petersburg museums and libraries, according to guardians of Russia’s cultural heritage meeting here Tuesday.

Leaky pipes, faulty wiring, sagging ceilings, lack of storage space, smog, humidity or simple neglect threaten the czars’ art collection housed at the Hermitage, Napoleon’s letters stored at Pushkin House and the pre-revolutionary paper trail warehoused at the Russian State Historical Archives, they said.

The fall of the Soviet empire has meant financial calamity for the great museums, libraries and archives housed in stately buildings along the Neva River, said the Russians and foreign curators, scholars and librarians who gathered here for a two-day conference titled “Collections at Risk: Preservation of the Cultural Heritage.”

The meeting was sponsored by the Los Angeles-based Getty Conservation Institute, which has given $123,000 in seed money to help build a center in St. Petersburg for the conservation of art, books and documents.

St. Petersburg’s situation is dire, all agreed.

The director of one of the city’s institutions warned that its treasures are in a firetrap.

“At any moment it could all fly up the chimney,” said Dmitri S. Likhachev, director of Pushkin House, where the manuscripts of such great Russian writers as Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol and Lermontov are stored alongside the works and letters of such foreigners as Byron, Dickens, Napoleon, Zola and Balzac.

“According to firefighters, in the event of fire, Pushkin House would burn to the ground in 20 minutes--faster than firefighters could arrive.”

St. Petersburg’s glory is the Hermitage, which was founded by Catherine II in 1764 and is now housed in five sprawling 18th-Century palaces. Its 3-million-piece collection includes the private treasures of every czar since Peter the Great, as well as the best of what the Bolsheviks seized from private collectors after the 1917 revolution.

Today, paintings by Cezanne, Monet and other masters hang in direct sunlight. They are guarded by babushki, elderly women shod in bathroom slippers. The museum has no air-conditioning, and in hot weather, upper-story windows are thrown open.

At the Russian State Historical Archives, a building that housed the Imperial Senate until the Bolsheviks demoted it to a document storehouse, the floors are creaking and could give way.

“Those documents hold the key to understanding Russia’s pre-revolutionary past,” said Alexander Fursenko, chairman of the Institute of History. “And they are stacked in ordinary cardboard boxes, like so much scrap paper.”

Dire predictions are being taken more seriously since the 1988 fire at the library of the Academy of Sciences. The fire, dubbed a cultural Chernobyl, destroyed 400,000 books and damaged 3.6 million more. Among the losses were the 5,000 books owned by Peter the Great, who built the library in 1714 to hold materials he collected during his travels.

The academy blaze began among newspapers on the third floor and raged for 29 hours. The cause was never officially determined, and library staffers squirm when pressed for details. But because fire broke out in two areas simultaneously, many suspect arson.

In addition to the 5,000 books lost, flames and water severely damaged another 180,000. The damaged ones were “checked out” to amateur bibliophiles, who dried them out as best they could by baking them in ovens, hanging them on clotheslines and fanning them with hair dryers.

Today, five years later, books are thawed and dried in specially designed chambers, and the building has a new fire suppression system. But the stacks still reek of smoke, and only 340 books have been fully restored.

“It could take another 50 years, it could take 500 years,” said Peter Waters of the Library of Congress.

The most likely victim of fire is Pushkin House, a tinder-dry building whose fire prevention system consists of patrolling off-duty firefighters sniffing for smoke.

“Writings from Pushkin’s hand are stacked in ordinary cardboard cartons on two shelves of dry, red wood. One spark and they’re gone,” Fursenko said.

In Pushkin House, central heating dries the books out during the long winter. Workers “control” humidity by putting pans of water on the radiators, Fursenko said.

Although the fire threat is real, Getty Institute experts say that greater threats are pollution, neglect and other problems too drab to attract much attention amid the chaos of post-Communist Russia.

Simple carelessness and ignorance are also part of the problem. On a tour of the academy Tuesday, visitors were ushered past a 10-volume encyclopedia written in part by Ivan the Terrible. It lay exposed on a table in a room filled with microbe-bearing houseplants.

Tour guides snatched up 200-year-old books, flipped them open to show off their fine condition, and tossed them back on the table. Waters and other American experts stood aghast but silent.