The scale of the great Russian art collections dazzles even the knowing visitor. You can go to the Hermitage in St Petersburg expecting to see Old Masters and French post-impressionists, but scarcely to see room upon room of them unfolding into the distance, all humbling masterpieces, the legacy of spendthrift tsars and of prodigal pre-revolutionary collectors such as Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Moro-zov, whose pictures were seized by the Bolsheviks. You can go to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, or to the Russian Museum in St Petersburg, expecting to discover Russian painters little known in the West, but even so, it is a shock to find dozens of them crowding in there, masters of landscape and of human drama, proof that Russia's artistic genius was second only to that of France in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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