The Hermitage, which boasts one of the richest art collections in the world, said after a routine inventory in late July that 221 items worth approximately $4.85 million had gone missing from storage, including icons, medieval and 19th-century jewelry, silverware and enameled objects.
"Don't hold your breath, I will not tender resignation voluntarily," Mikhail Piotrovsky said, arguing that similar incidents in other world museums had not prompted heads to roll.
Piotrovsky's boss, Mikhail Shvydkoi, in charge of the Federal Agency for Culture and Film, who called the theft scandal a "crisis of the [museum] system," said earlier that the Hermitage director should remain in his post.
"I do not think he should go," Shvydkoi said. "This is not the case for resignation. Then all [the museum or culture authorities] would have to resign. I myself would have to step down as well."
But Shvydkoi said the director would face a reprimand.
The Hermitage said staff members were likely to have been involved in the theft. Police detained three suspects, including the husband and son of the museum curator, who was in charge of the missing items and died suddenly when the check began.
A total of 13 stolen artifacts were returned to the museum in the last two weeks.
The popular Kommersant daily reported Tuesday that checks St. Petersburg's History Museum had also revealed that 300 items were missing from the storerooms, and scores of artifacts, mainly weapons, had been stolen from the Peter and Paul Fortress museum allegedly by staff members.
On Tuesday, Russia's cultural heritage watchdog reported the theft from state archives of scores of drawings and graphic designs by Yakov Chernikhov, a famous Soviet-era constructivist architect and author of a series of avant-garde art books. The check was undertaken after nine Chernikhov drawings were sold at Christie's on June 22.
About 300 Chernikhov drawings worth $1.3 million had already been regained from antiques markets in Russia and abroad.
Russian authorities have voiced concern over the security of Russia's museum collections in the wake of the revealed artwork thefts, which spotlighted a poor security record and low funding of cultural institutions since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Thursday that President Vladimir Putin had ordered the government to set up a commission by September 1 to conduct an inventory of all cultural treasures in the country's museums.
