the development of Russia and kept it separate from the rest of Europe. In Russia, there was no Renaissance, no Reformation, and certainly no Crusades or Inquisition. Hence, until Russia was “Europeanized” by Peter the Great, there was no antiquarian tradition as in the rest of Europe.

Some kinds of antiquities were revered not because of curiosity about or sympathy for ancient culture but because of sacred and religious reasons. There was a special reverence for Greek Christian culture rather than for Greek pagan culture, which was revered in Western Europe. For Russia, Greek Byzantine civilization was the source of the Russian Orthodox religion, and some antiquities were esteemed as insignia of power or attributes of rulers and heroes. So “Monomach’s cap,” the Russian crown, was revered as a Byzantine article even though, in reality, it had been made during the time of the Golden Horde. In Pskov, “the sword of Litvanian Count Dovmont,” the defender of the city, was saved and respected. It was to save such treasures that the czars created a state armory in the Kremlin in Moscow. First mentioned in documents in 1504, the armory still exists as a museum today.

The attitude toward other antiquities was utilitarian and not always good for the monuments. People extracted saltpeter from ancient earthworks, and barrows were simply robbed. In Siberia, special bands of barrow robbers, called bugrovshchiki (from bugor or “hillock,” the local term for “barrow”), made their living pillaging ancient monuments, and hundreds of the monuments disappeared. Observing the robbery of ancient graves and the melting down of treasures from them, the Dutchman Vitsen, who visited Russia during the time of Peter the Great, wrote that the Russians did not like antiquities. The collecting of classical antiquities had begun in Italy the late fifteenth century, in England in the sixteenth century, and in France in the seventeenth century, but it did not occur in Russia before the early eighteenth century.

Czarist Antiquarianism: The First Forms of Scholarly Attitude to Antiquities, 1696–1762

The development of antiquarianism in Russia was a result of the enlightened absolutism of Peter the Great. In the last years of the seventeenth century he traveled incognito throughout Europe, and on his return in 1698, he began to reform the whole of Russia based on European standards. These reforms involved changed attitudes to antiquities as well. Peter demanded that ancient numisma (coin collections) and other finds, as well as all kinds of curiosities and rarities, be sent to him from all over Russia. Between 1715 and 1716, a Uralian factory owner, Demidov, and Count Gagarin sent him collections of golden antiquities that had been taken away from the bugrovshchiki. In 1718, Peter created the Kunstkammer Museum in the newly founded capital of Saint Petersburg and issued a special edict ordering that everything that was very old and unusual was to be sent there. In 1721, he ordered that the curious things that were being found in Siberia were to be sent to him, and so the well-known Siberian collection of Scythian and Sarmatian gold, which is now in the Hermitage Museum, was established.

Under Peter the Great, scientific expeditions to Siberia began. In the 1720s, the German naturalist Messerschmidt was sent there for seven years to study Siberian natural resources and folk art and to buy and collect antiquities. The Russian Academy of Sciences, created by Peter and consisting in part of foreigners, took over the organization of the primary expeditions to Siberia only after Peter’s death. The great Siberian expedition of 1733–1743, led by Justus Bering, opened the strait between Asia and North America, and the archaeological survey of this expedition was conducted by the Germans Gerhard Miller and I. Gmelin.

Sentimental Opening of Classical Heritage, 1762–1812

After 1762, the German-born queen Catherine II ruled Russia. She was educated in the spirit of the French Enlightenment and corresponded with the French encyclopedists and the French writer François-Marie Voltaire. The cult of the civil ideals that grew out of the Enlightenment was connected with an interest in classical antiquity and with fashionable sentimentality, and the purchase of classical antiquities from elsewhere became common. In 1768, just a year after