The attempt to preserve an "oasis" of pre-revolutionary monarchal life in the oldest building on Nevsky Prospect was doomed to failure. The Anichkov Palace is a less prestigious building than the Winter Palace. However, some pieces of furniture from the private apartments of Maria Feodorovna, wife of Alexander III and mother of the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II, were salvaged from the pawnshop and sold abroad in 1928. Their connection with mineralogy and mining helped.
As is well known, Anichkov Palace, the former residence of the Queen Dowager, in 1918 by decree of the People's Commissar of Education became a "Museum of the City". The creators of the exhibition tried to tell not about Petrograd in particular, but about urban culture in general, as a special social organism. And the interiors of Maria Feodorovna's apartments, including the "Blue Drawing Room" were presented as an exhibition "The Historical Rooms of the Anichkov Palace." The palace servants - valets, maids, guards, and even court ladies - were also allowed to remain in their former positions. They were to submit a written application to the commissioner of the site, indicating the desired position in the museum.
Problems began when, in 1920, the museum was transferred from the People's Commissariat of Education to the Petrograd Soviet of Communal Services. Some of the museum's rooms had previously been set aside for employees' apartments. With the arrival of the Communists the process has intensified. The number of residents of the museum complex reached up to 700 people. Residents even lived in the main building of the palace. At some point, visitors could not even go through all the halls of the exhibition without meeting on the way living rooms. The estate began to turn into a dormitory, with all the attendant problems.
It was decided to give private rooms to offices of representative power apparatus - the District Executive Committee of the Soviet of Deputies. The museum was officially instructed to close the exhibition with the "tsarist treasures" within two weeks. Small valuables were to be sold through the city pawnshop, and the furniture, lamps and tableware were to be given to the hotel trust (information from Irina Karpenko's materials for the XXIV Tsarskoye Selo Conference).
The pair of vases made by the Peterhof lapidary factory (made in 1882) of Sayan Russian lapislazuli with bronze decoration, reduced copies of items made by the Ekaterinburg lapidary factory for the Winter Palace in the first half of the 19th century, could very probably end up at a sale or auction, something like in Ilf and Petrov's "The Twelve Chairs". The Empress's four-panel screen is in "numbers."
This masterpiece from the Imperial collection was made in the Karl-Julius Albrecht studio of artistic bronze in 1881. At the time, after Alexander II was assassinated, power passed to Alexander III and the Anichkov Palace was declared the main residence of the new monarch. Albrecht's workshop was responsible for the overall composition of the screen and the metal decoration in the form of floral garlands, while the Peterhof lapidary factory produced mosaic panels of Badakhshan lapis lazuli of three varieties and oval medallions with images of bouquets in the Florentine mosaic technique.
It was the lapislazuli and the medallion stones that saved this remarkable exhibit from an ignominious fate in the bustle of the hotel lobby. They corresponded best of all to the subject matter of the Applied Mineralogy Department of the Mining Museum, and were sent there in 1927.
The screen and vases nearly became victims of yet another disaster when they were put on display at the Mining University. Less than a year later, in January 1928, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR issued a decree "On measures to strengthen the export and sale of antiquities and art abroad".
"The People's Commissariat of Trade of the USSR shall appoint special commissioners to direct the work on the execution and selection of antiquities and art objects of export importance, including those that are part of the museum funds under the jurisdiction of the People's Commissariat of Education," reads the decree.
The return to the sphere of responsibility of the People' Commissariat saved the Anichkov Palace exhibits from the arbitrariness of the communal workers, but it put them under a new threat of being taken out of the country. The world's best Afghan and South Siberian lapislazuli, artwork of the highest level and belonging to the property of the imperial family would undoubtedly have been appreciated on the international market. Paintings by Leonardo, Rembrandt or exclusive jewelry, of course, could have been sold at a higher price. Nevertheless, trade commissioners with an unlimited mandate to find money to finance Stalinist industrialization projects would have been quite pleased.
The country's cultural heritage was saved by the authority of the Mining Museum (in 1919 it was classified in the first category, on a par with the Museum of the Academy of Sciences), or perhaps by the metaphysics of the objects themselves. They came to Maria Feodorovna, the Danish princess Dagmar, in the same year as she was crowned Russian empress. Their owner, who had lost her husband and son in Russia, was destined to return home after the revolution of 1917. But she hardly wished the same sad route for her materialized memories.
Maria Fyodorovna's screen is on display in the Pillar Hall of the Mining Museum (divided into two sashes). In 2017, it was comprehensively restored.
