Russian Museum of Ethnography Russian Museum of Ethnography The Russian Museum of Ethnography (Российский этнографический музей) is a museum in St. Petersburg that houses a collection of about 500,000 items relating to the ethnography, or cultural anthropology, of peoples of the former Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The museum was set up in 1902 as the ethnographic department of the Russian Museum. It is housed in a purpose-built Neoclassical building erected between 1902 and 1913 to Vasily Svinyin's design in the proximity of the Old Michael Palace (which accommodates the art collection of the Russian Museum). It occupies the place of the eastern
Hermitage Museum reopened. In 1948, 316 works of Impressionist, post-Impressionist, and modern art from the collection of the Museum of New Western Art in Moscow, originating mostly from the nationalized collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov and disestablished before the war, were transferred to the Hermitage, including works by Matisse and Picasso. Beginning in 1967, a number of works by Matisse were donated to the museum by his muse Lydia Delectorskaya. In 1981, the restored Menshikov Palace became a new branch of the Hermitage museum, displaying Russian culture of the early 18th century. On 15 June 1985, a man later judged