The Hermitage in St Petersburg is not just any museum and, as its director, Dr Mikhail Piotrovsky, knows, running it is not just any job, especially during one of the most turbulent eras in Russian history

Being a director of any major international museum in the 21st century is an increasingly demanding job, calling for a rare combination of talents and abilities. Being director of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg throughout one of the most uncertain periods of Russia's history has to be especially daunting. But Dr Mikhail Piotrovsky, a dapper, grey-haired man with lively eyes, now in his mid-60s, an Arabist and expert on Islamic art and culture, comes across as being supremely relaxed in the role. His visit to Dublin recently - when he delivered the Chester Beatty Lecture, Islamic Art in the Mirror of the Hermitage - was his first, though he travels a great deal and has often visited London, where the Royal Academy is currently hosting From Russia, a blockbuster exhibition that features many works from the Hermitage.

The Hermitage is not just any museum. It is, through historical circumstance, one of the cultural wonders of the world, an eclectic treasure trove, its extensive collections incorporating some of the finest artefacts of the ancient occidental and oriental worlds as well as a large proportion of the masterpieces of European painting and sculpture up to the early 20th century. Its holdings of French paintings of the early Modernist period, to take one example, are mind-boggling in their sheer richness and depth, thanks to the extraordinary efforts of a relatively small number of Russian collectors, the post- revolutionary nationalisation of private art collections, and post-second World War settlements.

Piotrovsky is the recipient of myriad honours and awards, and is probably the only museum director to have "a minor planet" named after him (in fact it is named for both him and his father). He has been instrumental, since his appointment in 1992, in reviving and repositioning the Hermitage globally. Some of his policies have been controversial, to put it mildly, but they were necessitated by exceptional circumstances and they have, on the whole, worked. In the long run he may go down in history as the man who saved the Hermitage.

He was born in Yerevan, Armenia, in 1944. His father was a renowned archaeologist, Boris Borisovich Piotrovsky, who was attached to the Hermitage for all of his working life and became director in 1964. Employed at the museum during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, he was briefly imprisoned but fared better than many of his co-workers, who were dispatched to labour camps or, in some cases, executed.

His son gained early familiarity with a world of archaeological field trips, scholarship and museology, a familiarity that decisively shaped his own ambitions, though with one caveat. "I wanted to find an area of study different from my father's," Piotrovsky notes with a smile.

That wish led him to Arabic studies at the oriental faculty of Leningrad State University and, for a spell, at Cairo University. He went on to work extensively on archaeological excavations in Yemen and other locations. The list of his scholarly publications on aspects of Islamic and Arab art and culture is formidable and includes both general and specific studies.

His father remained director of the Hermitage until his death in 1990, and the following year Piotrovsky was invited to join the staff of the museum as first deputy director with responsibility for research.

IT WAS AN exceptionally turbulent time in Russia's history. The Soviet Union was in the process of tearing itself apart. The nominal president, Mikhail Gorbachev, found himself powerless as republic after republic ceded from the union, which was eventually dissolved in a process that coincided with a traumatic move to a market-based economy and the rise of the economic oligarchs.

The State itself, however, was desperately short of money and the Hermitage was starved of funds. Against the background of the early days of this dramatic transformation, Piotrovsky was appointed director of the museum by government decree. It could well be that he was regarded as a safe pair of hands, someone ideally suited to guide a celebrated national institution through a period of uncertainty, which has proved to be the case. Throughout his tenure, the museum has had to adjust to radically altered economic and political realities, realities which are, he observes, not all bad.

"In the post-Soviet era we have the opportunity to negotiate for ourselves with regard to many issues relating to the museum, including exhibitions worldwide, for example. We have more autonomy that way," he says.

Autonomy also means coping with the realities of a market economy and government underfunding. To a greater extent than most comparable institutions internationally, the Hermitage has had to direct a huge amount of energy and inventiveness into fund-raising.

"Throughout a certain period it was difficult to concentrate on the full range of activities because we had to focus so much on basic things, particularly the repair and restoration of the buildings - palaces have their drawbacks when used as museums," Piotrovsky notes with a rueful smile.

The considerable problems with the fabric of the Hermitage's buildings extended well back into the Soviet era. Part of the solution was to play the Hermitage's trump card: the sheer richness of its collections.

"We organised exhibitions that were designed to draw donors," Piotrovsky says, meaning not only Russian donors but, more importantly, international ones. He emphasises the vital role of many international foundations and branches of Friends of the Hermitage. Hard cash flowed in, and that has been the path Piotrovsky has followed since: let the museum's main asset work for its keep.

Research and scholarship, central to the institution's intellectual vitality and position internationally, suffered for a while. Even now, Piotrovsky says, "we have a serious fight with the authorities over the issue of scholarship". They tend to take a severely "capitalist view" of a museum as providing a service for the people, he explains, of making its collection available to the public - "but that is no way to treat a museum".

Despite the apparent wealth in sectors of the Russian economy - with Russia's newly wealthy contributing significantly to the boom in the art market, for example - the Hermitage is still underfunded by international standards. Of course, Piotrovsky says, the museum continues to be a centre of academic research, by virtue of the centrality of its collections to so many areas of scholarship.

Equally, to maintain the vitality of a museum, collections have to be developed, something that is becoming increasingly expensive. Apart from its own resources, the Hermitage draws on a circle of donors. Off the cuff, Piotrovsky reckons the museum spent around €1.3 million on acquisitions last year, a modest amount for such an institution.

"Another problem," he adds, "is that, like the Chester Beatty here in Dublin, you must try to meet the level of what you already have, which is difficult."

Nevertheless, current plans include the development of a contemporary art collection, to be housed in a newly restored set of buildings, which says a great deal about the success of his strategy for the museum's future.

ALTHOUGH IN HIS demeanour he comes across as an old-world Soviet scholar and bureaucrat, he has been contentiously new-world in his stewardship of the Hermitage. While the announcement of the museum's alliance with the franchise king of the museum world, Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Foundation, was surprising, their first joint venture met with incredulity and not a little criticism, largely because of its unlikely location: Las Vegas. The Guggenheim- Hermitage in Las Vegas, designed by prestige architect Rem Koolhaas, opened late in 2001 and attracted considerable publicity. It seemed as though the Hermitage, a bastion of high culture on a par with the Louvre, was slumming it. Many commentators felt that the Guggenheim had a lot more to gain from the arrangement than the Hermitage, but one can see Piotrovsky's brutally simple point: the Hermitage needs money. Anyway, as he said at the time, he is not a cultural snob, and he believes that art belongs to the masses.

"The Hermitage is a universal museum. It's about the world, and open to the world," he says. "It's a part of Russian cultural history and it shows world art in a Russian context and Russian art and culture in a global context. I think this policy of openness to the world existed even during the totalitarian times."

He has, in a sense, taken a logical step given the changing circumstances he faced. With several satellites, including those in Amsterdam and London, his experiment with the Guggenheim prototype seems increasingly justified.

As it happens, his worst moment as director came about through absolutely no fault of his own. A national scandal blew up in 2006 when it was revealed that more than 200 objects had been stolen from Hermitage collections. There were calls for his resignation. Another institution quickly revealed that it, too, had been the victim of theft. President Putin called for an audit of national collections. In both instances, the perpetrators were employees of the institutions.

In the case of the Hermitage, a curator suffered a fatal heart attack on hearing that her department was to be reviewed. Some commentators were quick to point out that, rather than lax security, the thefts were indicative of the extremely poor salaries paid to the staff.

Piotrovksy has been described as an associate of Putin. He is listed as being on the board of directors of Russian television's Channel One. The channel, which has a convoluted, much-discussed history in relation to its ownership and control, has been criticised for its partisan support for the official line and for Putin, a support that, its detractors claim, has usurped any claim to journalistic objectivity.

One could argue that the hard fact is that the Hermitage needs the ear of whoever is president. In any case, late last year Piotrovsky indicated the limits of his adherence to the party line when, with other prominent cultural figures in the city, and to the surprise of a generally acquiescent Russian establishment, he came out against a plan by the state gas giant, Gazprom, to build a huge skyscraper in St Petersburg. But then for him, one feels, anything that affects the Hermitage is personal.