Hermitage Museum private mansions were nationalized and redistributed among major Soviet state museums. Particularly notable was the influx of old masters from the Catherine Palace, the Alexander Palace, the Stroganov Palace and the Yusupov Palace as well as from other palaces of Saint Petersburg and suburbs. In 1922, an important collection of 19th-century European paintings was transferred to the Hermitage from the Academy of Arts. In turn, in 1927 about 500 important paintings were transferred to the Central Museum of old Western art in Moscow at the insistence of the Soviet authorities. In the early 1930s, 70 more paintings were sent there.
Hermitage Museum art collections of the Hermitage to the general public for years. There are a series of programs that have aired entitled ‘My Hermitage’ that have been particularly successful. All of these programs are organized by the Director of the Hermitage, Professor Mikhail Piotrovsky, and are quite similar to the broadcasts created by Academician Boris Piotrovsky, who is Mikhail’s father. These programs were first broadcast through the Soviet Union’s ‘First’ channel, airing at the height of the museum’s boom. During this time, this channel recorded more than three million visitors every year, mostly from the Soviet Union. Another program created by