Already on June 23, 1941, preparations for evacuation began in the two largest museums in Leningrad - the Hermitage and the Russian Museum. In parallel, this work unfolded in the palaces-museums of the suburbs - Pushkin, Peterhof, Oranienbaum and Pavlovsk.
The owners of valuable libraries and works of art, going into evacuation and worried about their safety, transferred their collections for storage to museums. So the Russian Museum accepted the art collections of A.P. Ostroumova-Lebedeva, N.I. Altman and N.A. Tyrsa. Museums also received works of art acquired by the procurement commission.
Museum employees organized exhibitions, were engaged in publishing and scientific work. So, in 1941, scientific meetings were held in the Hermitage dedicated to the 800th anniversary of the Azerbaijani poet Nizami Ganjavi and the 500th anniversary of the Uzbek poet Alisher Navoi.
