Hermitage Museum the honor was awarded to the city of Ferrara which proposed its Castle Estense as the base. Since then, the new institution called "Ermitage Italia" started a research and scientific collaboration with the Hermitage foundation. Hermitage-Vyborg Center was opened in June 2010 in Vyborg, Leningrad Oblast. A Hermitage branch is due to open in Vladivostok by 2016, and the regional government has allocated more than Rb17.7 million ($558,000) for preliminary reconstruction work on a mansion in Vladivostok’s historic downtown district to house the satellite. The Hermitage-Siberia is due to open in Omsk in 2016. In recent years, there have been
Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings were made in the same period, notably the Codex Siniaticus from the Russian National Library, sold in 1933 to the British Museum (after 1973 British Library) for £100,000 raised by public subscription (worth £ in 2019), and "The Night Café" by Vincent van Gogh. In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Parliament of the Russian Federation passed a new law prohibiting the sale of Russian art treasures to foreign countries. For many years the National Gallery was reluctant to lend the paintings it had bought from the Hermitage back to that Museum, for fear that the