Nicholas II established the museum on April 13, 1896, to commemorate his father Alexander III - the same Alexander whose unexpected death in 1894 had pitched the unprepared 26-year-old Nicholas onto the throne. The original collection was assembled by stripping Russian works from the Hermitage, the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, and the Imperial Academy of Arts. Vasily Svinyin redesigned the interiors of the Mikhailovsky Palace - a neoclassical Carlo Rossi building from 1819-25, formerly the residence of Grand Duke Michael Pavlovich - to serve as the new museum. The grand opening came on March 17, 1898. The first director was Nicholas's cousin Grand Duke Georgy Mikhailovich, who would die in 1919 in a Bolshevik prison cell at the Peter and Paul Fortress, half a kilometer across the Neva from the museum he had run for two decades.

What began in the Mikhailovsky Palace did not stay there. Over the twentieth century the museum absorbed an entire architectural ensemble: the Mikhailovsky Palace itself, the Benois Building (designed 1910-12, finished after the revolution), the Marble Palace (1768-85, built for Catherine the Great's favorite Count Orlov), Saint Michael's Castle (the strange brooding fortress of Emperor Paul I, 1797-1801, where he was murdered in his bedroom), the small Summer Palace of Peter the Great (1710-14) in the Summer Garden, and the Stroganov Palace on Nevsky Prospekt - the Rastrelli baroque masterpiece from the early 1750s. Together they form one of the largest art-museum complexes in the world by floor area, more than 30 hectares of gallery space spread across central Petersburg.

The collection runs from the 12th century to last week. The earliest piece, The Angel with Golden Hair, is a Novgorod icon from the 1100s where the Archangel Gabriel's hair is rendered in pure gold leaf laid in fine parallel strands - one of the supreme achievements of medieval Orthodox iconography. From there the chronology unrolls: Andrei Rublev's circle in the early 1400s, Dionysius's Harrowing of Hell (1495-1504), Simon Ushakov's seventeenth-century icons that begin to look almost Western, and then the explosion of secular Russian painting from Peter the Great's era forward. Karl Brullov's Last Day of Pompeii (1830-33), the picture that made Russian academic painting internationally famous. Aivazovsky's Ninth Wave (1850), the most reproduced seascape in Russian art. Repin's Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks (1880-91), a wall of laughing men writing an obscene letter to the Sultan. Vasnetsov's Knight at the Crossroads. Surikov, Levitan, Serov, Bakst, Kustodiev. The whole nineteenth century is here.

And then the Russian avant-garde. The early twentieth century in Russia produced Kandinsky, Malevich, Goncharova, Larionov, Tatlin, Popova, Rodchenko - artists who were inventing abstract painting and Constructivism at exactly the moment the Tsarist state was collapsing. Many of these works were nationalized after 1917 from collectors like Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov; others came to the museum directly from artists' studios as the new Soviet state established its art institutions. The museum holds Malevich's Black Square (1923 version), his Suprematist compositions, and major works by everyone in the circle around him. For decades during the Stalin era these paintings were considered ideologically dangerous and kept in storage. Most went on permanent display only after 1988. They now occupy several rooms of the Benois Building, where you can stand in front of the Black Square and try to figure out what it actually is.

The museum has its own restoration service - 16 specialized workshops, 95 staff, capable of treating everything from 12th-century tempera on wood to contemporary mixed-media installations. The first restoration workshop was set up in 1922 amid civil war and famine. During World War II, when Leningrad was besieged for 872 days and starved, museum staff lived in the cellars of the Mikhailovsky Palace and protected the collection that could not be evacuated. The most precious works had been crated up and shipped east to the Urals before the German encirclement closed; what remained was hidden, sandbagged, and watched over by curators who themselves froze and starved. The Russian Museum lost staff to the siege but did not lose paintings. The collection survived intact, and remains one of the great national archives of any country - nearly 410,000 works of Russian art, from a single nation's continuous thousand-year visual conversation with itself.