Peter the Great's Own Freak Show

ST. PETERSBURG -- P.T. Barnum would surely have been pleased by the new spirit at the Museum of Anthropology, long a quiet backwater off the city's Neva River.After decades of keeping most of its unique collection of anatomical freaks hidden in the building's basement, the museum has brought them out, and is now employing some of the 19th-century master showman's techniques to attract crowds and earn money."Come on in, ladies and gentlemen, and see the world's most unusual collection of anatomical monsters!" an elderly female guard shouts from her post at the door, hawking the special exhibit, which features an assortment of human oddities preserved in formaldehyde.The masses are indeed coming. Since the museum opened the special exhibition in March, about half a million visitors have paid an extra 1,000 rubles to see what is surely among the world's most bizarre spectacles.The collection -- oddly called the kunstkammer, or "art chamber" -- divides its freaks into several sections, most of which consist of 300-year-old stillborn fetuses preserved inside small glass tanks. One section features a number of Siamese twins with varying deformities. Another area shows human mermaids, whose upper body is normally developed but whose legs are nothing more than a long tail. Perhaps the most unusual of all the anatomical rarities on display are the Januses, who have faces on two sides of their heads.The bizarre -- and for some revolting -- collection was the acquisition of Tsar Peter the Great, who first saw it when visiting Holland in 1697. There he found Frederik Ruysch, a specialist in anatomy who collected and preserved unusual examples of human deformation for his own museum.The Russian tsar fell in love with the collection, apparently quite literally. "Having stopped in front of a child's body which was so perfectly preserved that the child seemed alive and smiling, Peter could not refrain from kissing the baby," one writer of the period noted.By 1718, Peter the Great succeeded in purchasing the oddities for a then-immense sum of 30,000 guilders. He brought them to St. Petersburg, where some of the items have remained on display ever since. "When Peter the First started collecting these rare specimens, including these monsters, he wrote that everyone should see that these occurred not from devilish actions, but from the regular development of nature," said museum director Alexander Milnikov. "In our time, when there is an expansion in all kinds of occult sciences and mysticism, it's very important to show that this development is natural by showing concrete examples."He dismisses suggestions that the collection is unsavory, pointing out that since the exhibition is in a separate room, those who do not want to see it can easily avoid it. Russian parents seem to have no problem with the collection either, and many hoist up their small children to get a closer look at the anatomical rarities. For the museum, promotion of the exhibit is essential to staying alive in the post-communist market system, for the state no longer gives them all the money they need."On one hand, we are carrying out scientific work, and on the other we are earning money for the development for the museum," Milnikov said.Next year, Western Europe will get a chance to see the exhibition for the first time since it left the Netherlands in 1718, earning the museum even more. Milnikov said he recently signed an agreement to allow the collection to tour Paris, London, Antwerp, Munich, Frankfurt, Berlin, Zurich, Vienna, Milan and Barcelona.Until then, the St. Petersburg museum will maintain its special exhibition of the anatomical freaks, the director said, as long as the crowds keep coming.