A fabulous cache of Impressionist and other paintings, hidden for 50 years, is surfacing in a new exhibit at the Hermitage, Russia's museum of the czars in St. Petersburg. The paintings, by masters such as Van Gogh, Degas, Monet and Renoir, were confiscated from Germany by the Red Army at the close of World War II. One of the most opulent sites on Earth, the Hermitage includes the Winter Palace of the Romanov czars, who lived on a scale of lavish luxury rivaled only by the Bourbons and the Habsburgs. It's history goes back to Czar Peter the Great and the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703 as "a window on Europe" for Mother Russia. By 1783, Catherine the Great had purchased artworks by the thousands. To house them she added annex after annex to the Winter Palace, calling them her Hermitage — literally, a home for hermits; figuratively, a refuge.

To be an independent artist in the USSR until recently was to live a secret, underground existence. Things are very different these days...

No one can be sure whether Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has the will and imagination to quiet the deep, long-standing fears and suspicions that many in the world have about the Soviet Union. But there is little doubt that Gorbachev, with great charm and tact and flair, has managed in a relatively brief time to push Western diplomats and their old assumptions far off balance. Despite protests from the White House that he has done little more than seize old ideas of President Reagan’s on arms control, much of the world sees Gorbachev as an innovator and a pragmatic compromiser, a statesman whose initiative and determination are responsible for the forthcoming treaty that would dismantle and destroy some nuclear weapons for the first time...

A visitor to the Soviet Union these days finds a myriad of voices and images that reflect the headiness of change, the thrill of hope and the fear of failure. The angry, elderly man, a black cap snug on his silvery hair, stared at the painting on a stand in Moscow’s Izmailova Park on a recent Sunday morning and demanded that the artist pull it down. “This is not art,” the elderly man said. The commotion prompted onlookers to crowd around the critic. They laughed at him, jeered at him, thrust their fingers at him to make their point. “Who the hell are you?” someone demanded. The elderly man finally gave up and stormed off...

[Series REMAKING THE REVOLUTION: Gorbachev's Gamble] When Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and thus the founding father of the Soviet Union, died in 1924, his widow, Natalya Krupskaya, implored his followers: “Do not let your sorrow for Ilyich find expression in outward veneration of his personality. Do not raise monuments to him or palaces to his name. Do not organize pompous ceremonies in his memory.” The followers turned their backs on the widow’s plea. They turned from her, in fact, like a furious whirlwind and created out of Lenin a prophet or a saint or even a god on earth. No other hero of the 20th Century anywhere is venerated the way Lenin is venerated in the Soviet Union...

[Series REMAKING THE REVOLUTION: Gorbachev's Gamble] The Great October Revolution began here in St. Petersburg in 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized the reins of a battered Russia in a frenetic time that the American journalist John Reed called the “10 days that shook the world.” Leningrad, as St. Petersburg is now known, is thus a kind of holy city in the Soviet Union, the city of the vanguard of the revolution. Yet now, 70 years after the revolution, the Soviet Union’s second-largest city hardly seems in the vanguard of anything. Leningrad is, in fact, a little out of date and out of step with the reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev...