Two arrested in Hermitage theft

The arrest of the son and husband of a late museum curator suspected of involvement in the theft of items from the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, has focused attention on the appallingly lax security and record keeping that has become so common at many of that country’s cash-strapped museums since the 1991 Soviet collapse.

“The event in the Hermitage is not an isolated incident but part of a pattern,” Boris Boyarskov, head of the Culture Ministry’s department in charge of protection of cultural valuables, said Monday. He lamented “the betrayal by the elite of the museum community, the curators.”

The head of Russia’s federal culture agency, Mikhail Shvydkoi, said the thefts showed an urgent need to modernize museums’ cataloging systems. Only one-quarter of the nation’s estimated 50 million artworks have been inventoried recently, he said.