Why I hate Russians

I wrote the following:

This book of postcards presents thirty of the finest paintings from the fabled collection of the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Founded by Empress Catherine the Great, the Hermitage occupies ten buildings, five of which were erected in the eighteenth century. Grandest of all is the Winter Palace, the richly ornamented home of the ruling Romanov dynasty until the Russian Revolution. So imagine that you are walking along echoing halls, across gleaming parquet floors, under vaulted ceilings from which hang gold-plated chandeliers, as you take in this assortment of landscapes, madonnas, still lifes, and portraits from Russia, Italy, France, England, Holland, Flanders, and Germany.

They wrote:

Vaulted ceilings are hardly typical of the palatial and museum interiors - please rephrase

I wrote:

Dear Olga,

Gina has passed to me your request for a series of
changes to the back cover text, which I wrote. Thank
you for your careful and thorough inspection. I have
never visited the Hermitage and so am at a real
disadvantage when it comes to describing the museum. I
had to rely on information and images presented on the
official Hermitage website, hence my confusion. My
suggestion that a walk through the Hermitage might
involve passing under vaulted ceilings was the
unfortunate result of the website's pictures of the
Raphael loggias, the War Gallery of 1812, the Peter's
(Small Throne) Room, the Alexander Hall, the Gothic
Drawing Room of Grand Princesses, the Gold Drawing
Room, the White Hall, the Corner Drawing-Room of
Emperor Nicholas I, and the Study of Empress Alexandra
Fyodorovnas. My apologies.

Yours very truly,
Sam Gilbert

And Steven Linberg commented, from Paris:

It would be odd if the Hermitage didn't have vaulted ceilings. The fucking
thing wasn't built by the Bauhaus, after all. Believe me, as a translator,
I've encountered this thing a million times. If queried, it will turn out
they think "vaulted" means either that there are safes in the ceiling
or Sergey Bubka cleared it at one go.

Soviet-built steamrollers, Olga and Nataha replied to another part of the text, which reads:

Friend of French philosophers and foe of Russian serfs, Catherine the Great acquired a collection of fine European paintings with which she adorned the Winter Palace, a treasure-house the empress coyly likened to the retreat of a hermit. Forty-five years after Catherine’s death, the nineteenth-century traveler Johann Georg Kohl noted the preponderance of Netherlandish works in the collection, citing “more unroasted and roasted game, than roasted martyrs; more hares transfixed by the spit of the cook, than St. Sebastians by the arrows of the heathen.” Culinary subjects lost their prominence as Catherine’s successors snatched up masterpieces by Titian, Leonardo, and Raphael; Fragonard, Sisley, and Renoir; Gainsborough, Gauguin, and Friedrich—all of whom are represented in this book of postcards. Under the reign of Joseph Stalin dramatic changes reshaped the Hermitage, as an antibourgeois purge of many works was followed by an influx of art taken as booty by the Red Army during World War II.
Today the Hermitage is incontestably one of the world’s greatest museums. Its doors long open to all, it has not served as a monarch’s private retreat since 1852, when it was first opened to the public. Most recently, satellite Hermitages have popped up in Amsterdam, London, and Las Vegas; one will soon open in Ferrara.

They said:

There is a problem with intro text. It looks funny and even smart, however, unfortunately, it's untrue in most of its statements and cannot be published in a book of postcards which we are going to sell inside the Hermitage museum.
For your guidence, attached please find some texts taken from the official Hermitage web site and from the St Petersburg Rough Guide. We do hope this will be helpful and useful to create something more plausible for this and forthcoming postcard books on the Hermitage collection.

I could only say

I mean, how am I supposed to cope with such boneheads? If they knew a vaulted ceiling from a Gazprom stock offering I'd be willing to enter into a conversation with these ignoramuses but when they fail to identify a single error or inaccuracy in my introduction and summarily reject it I just want to point every anti-ballistic missile in Europe at Saint Petersburg and fire away. I'd crawl over broken glass from Moscow to Khartoum if Olga showed me a single mistake in my introduction.