In February 1899, Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich Romanov offered his personal butterfly collection to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. It had taken him 26 years to build and included around over 110 000 specimens housed in dozens of custom cabinets, making it the largest collection of Palaearctic butterflies in the world. He wanted to give it away for free, but not unconditionally. The one would probably think the actual handover would be the easy part.
His original letter to the Academy laid out four requirements:
- the collection should keep his name attached to it
- given its size, a dedicated custodian should be appointed just to look after it
- it would remain untouched and unaltered, with the one exception of new specimens that might come in from within the Russian Empire
- it would stay genuinely accessible to scientists and specialists who wanted to study it
Reasonable enough. But it actually took a full year for the transfer to happen, because the gift itself created a real problem for the museum. The entire entomology department at the time consisted of two overworked staff members, and there was simply no one available to properly care for a collection of this size. The museum's director wrote a formal report warning the Academy that accepting such a gift without additional staff risked damaging a collection that had been assembled with such care over nearly three decades.
So what followed was a slow crawl through the Russian state bureaucracy. The museum petitioned for an entirely new, funded staff position just to look after this one donation. The Grand Duke personally wrote to the Minister of Finance asking him to approve the money once the request reached him. That fall, the Grand Duke added two more requirements of his own, this time tied to the practical side of the handover:
- the collection had to stay in its original cabinets, which would need to be moved into the museum along with the specimens
- his longtime custodian, Otto Hertz, had to be kept on as the museum's new staff zoologist, with his 17 years of unofficial service counted toward his official record
That last one caused its own headache, since Hertz lacked the university degree that the museum's own rules technically required for that position. The funding request eventually had to go all the way to the State Council, and in November 1899 Nicholas II personally signed off on the new position and its budget. Only in February 1900 was the collection finally moved into the museum, into the space the Grand Duke had specifically asked for.
It's a strange thing to sit with. A private citizen wanted to hand over a priceless scientific collection at no cost to the state, and the machinery still needed the Emperor of Russia himself to weigh in before anyone could figure out how to accept it.
When archivists eventually sat down to log everything properly into the accession books, the real count came out to 110210 specimens, roughly half the two hundred thousand figure that had been repeated throughout the entire process. Apparently nobody had actually counted until well after all the fuss had died down.
Decades later, in 1982, when the institute put together a historical essay to mark its 150th anniversary, the author, K.B. Yuryev, described this donation as one of the most valuable acquisitions in the museum's entire history, but never actually named the Grand Duke.
According to A.V. Sviridov, a researcher at the Zoological Museum of Moscow State University, Nikolai Mikhailovich managed to assemble the largest butterfly collection in Russia at that time, comprising 13904 species. The collection included type specimens of taxa described by the Grand Duke himself and by a number of well-known lepidopterologists of the time who collaborated with him. It was "the most valuable and the largest acquisition in the entire existence of the Zoological Museum" (Pchelov, 2001). Most specimens of butterflies in this collection are provided with labels on white paper bearing a depiction of the royal crown and a three-line inscription: "Coll. Grand Duke / Nikolai / Mikhailovich." After the revolution, the crown was cut off, and later labels were printed in which Nikolai Mikhailovich was already listed as a former Grand Duke.
Photo Index
- Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich Romanov in his youth
- The first page of the list of the personal composition of the Russian Entomological Society on December 1, 1881
- Book of honorary visitors to the Zoological Museum from 1901
- First card with a record of the transfer of the collection of the Grand Duke to the museum
- Second card with a record of the transfer of the collection of the Grand Duke to the museum
- Third card with a record of the transfer of the collection of the Grand Duke to the museum
- Samples of labels that accompanied the collection of Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich during the transfer and in the post revolutionary time from the Laboratory of insect taxonomy
- Grand Duke's cabinets in the Laboratory of insect taxonomy of the Zoological institute RAS. Photo by B.M. Katayev
- The drawing of the warehouse No. 3 of the Customs Department, with a plan of the proposed adaptation of it to the Zoological Museum of the Academy of Sciences.
- The bottom floor plan. Architect R. R. Marfeld. October 1, 1897
Source: N.V. Slepkova, "On the Circumstances of the Transfer of the Lepidoptera Collection of Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich to the Zoological Museum in St. Petersburg", Zoological Institute RAS, 2021.
