Dateline St. Petersburg, Russia – Imagine an art museum that actually encourages visitors to photograph its famous paintings. A museum whose collection many regard as the world’s most fabulous, covering four large city blocks inside an opulent historic palace where treasures worth billions of dollars are guarded by modern cameras and babushkas, stocky middle-aged women whose only uniforms are the scarves they wear to keep their heads warm.

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This is the Hermitage, for centuries the Winter Palace of Catherine the Great of Russia and her successors, where windows between the galleries look across the Neva River to the 17th century Fortress of Peter and Paul, built by Czar Peter I (the Great) to protect his newly-created capital of St. Petersburg against the formidable Swedes and Finns from whom he had recently wrested Russia’s first outlet to the Baltic Sea.

Hey, Buddy, Can You Spare 20 Years?

This is a museum said to take 20 years of daily visits to see in its entirety, showcasing works as varied as ancient Siberian relics and Impressionist paintings by Renoir, plus a grand staircase to rival that of the Louvre in Paris. But the main entry here is painted in whitewash and 18-carat gilt, not the cold grey stone of the Louvre.

The collection here has something for almost every taste: Nudes by Peter Paul Rubens and the gardens of Giverney painted by Claude Monet. Masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci and huge canvasses by Rembrandt. Two full rooms of Picasso and a wild and colorful lilac bush by Vincent Van Gogh. Medieval icons and Henri Matisse. Great British painters from Gainsborough to Sisley.

In any other major museum with a collection on this scale, photography would be strictly forbidden. Art lovers have been forcibly ousted from museums for snapping shots of favorites they can’t find in the postcard section of the gift shop. But not here.

As our bus wended its way from the pier on the Neva where our river cruise ship, the Viking Truvor, docked while serving as a luxury in-town hotel, our scholarly guide Victoria Vidkovskaya passed along the rules: “Photography is included in the ticket price, just no flashes,” she announced, astonishing visitors who had occasionally played cat-and-mouse with guards in other museums determined to prevent snapshots of their treasures.

Don’t Try to be Flashy

But this is Russia, a land where anything seems to go at times. While museum curators the world over fear flash photography can fade the colors of their prize pieces, bulbs pop regularly in the Hermitage as visitors ignore the no-flash rule without penalty while planning the albums they might create after returning home.

How about a nice enlargement of Rembrandt’s wall-filling “Return of the Prodigal Son,” complemented by El Greco’s “Portrait of the Apostles Peter and Paul?” Followed up by Picasso’s “Woman with a Fan” and “The Painter’s Family” by Matisse?

You can photograph them all here. But first must get into the museum, which sounds simple but sometimes is not because of the sheer numbers of people wanting to see this prize collection.

“Small cloak room. 1400 persons,” says an unobtrusive sign in the lobby through which every visitor passes.

Not so small, you may think. The larger cloak room across the big hall can handle the coats and hats of 5,700 persons. Maybe some of the many Russians who habitually gripe that their huge country is too thinly populated could take comfort from visiting this, at times the world’s most crowded museum.

40,000 in One Day

All those wide-open spaces in the 6.6 million-square mile nation might look a little better to the complainers if they’d experienced the crush of the Hermitage on a summer weekday afternoon, when more than 40,000 persons cram the museum and at times 2,000 or more wait to move through the turnstiles. You can wait 25 minutes just to get a look at a Da Vinci or a Michelangelo statue.

In the Hermitage, a cloakroom for 1,400 can legitimately be called small.

No visit to this museum will ever be a small experience.

Overwhelming, might be a better word for a collection many times larger than what you can ever see in Los Angeles’ Getty Museum or the DeYoung in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park – combined.

Peter the Great began this collection soon after 250,000 of his serfs started building St. Petersburg. Two generations later, agents of Catherine the Great fanned across Europe with unlimited funds, buying up the best of Rubens and Rafael, Vermeer and Tintoretto, then shipped them north to the Winter Palace.

The Soviet Union enlarged the collection by confiscating large private holdings from Russian aristocrats whose marble palaces (many of them now office buildings) still dot St. Petersburg. Then the Red Army sent more, taking over collections that had been stolen by Nazi German leaders like Hermann Goering from Jews and others all over Europe.

Now it’s all in the Hermitage, whose four stories can still only display less than half the full collection at any one time. In short, this is an art museum of matchless breadth and depth, by itself worth the trip to Russia.

And you can photograph as much of it as you like, to enjoy at home for years to come. Just be careful not to knock any paintings off the wall in the jostling of the crowds, as almost happened to a baroque Jose de Ribera treasure during our visit, when a Belgian woman backed into it while lining up a shot of a Diego Velazquez canvas across the room. Knocked askew, the painting stayed that way, no guard or curator even noticing the incident.

Reaching St. Petersburg: Air connections from most major European cities are available, but not as frequent as travelers might expect, partly because the city’s tiny Pulkovo Airport is a decaying relic of the Soviet era. Many Americans find it more convenient to come via a Baltic cruise (lines like Princess and Royal Caribbean have such sailings, almost all including a day or two in St. Petersburg.) Several river cruise lines, with Viking River Cruises offering the most sailings, offer three-day stays in the city including guided shore excursions to the Hermitage.

Hotels: There are few luxury hotels in St. Petersburg, although Radisson Blu operates two. Most economical might be the huge (3,000-room) Park Inn Pribaltiskaya at $190 per night double for bed and a sumptuous breakfast buffet. This gray concrete example of the massive Soviet architecture of the 1960s has been renovated within the last three years, now offering firm beds and modern bathrooms. Its location, west of downtown, is not very central; however the subway is nearby, with easy connections everywhere in town for 28 rubles (about 92 cents).

Mr. Elias writes a syndicated column on California public affairs appearing in 93 newspapers. He may be contacted at tdelias@aol.com.