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The Soviet Museum and Its Public During the Cultural Revolution

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The Soviet Museum and Its Public During the Cultural Revolution KONSTANTIN AKINSHA (Washington, DC, USA) ADAM JOLLES (Tallahassee, FL, USA) ON THE THIRD FRONT: THE SOVIET MUSEUM AND ITS PUBLIC DURING THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION In 1928, two Russian satirists, II'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov, published a picaresque adventure-drama destined to become one of the most popular novels of the Cultural Revolution. The plot of their novel, The Twelve Chairs, concerns a desperate race to locate a missing fortune in jewels rumored to be hidden in the seat of one of twelve upholstered chairs confiscated during the revolution from the family of one of the protagonists, the former nobleman Ippolit Matveevich Vorob'ianinov. Working in tandem with Ostap Bender, a young miscreant looking to make some fast money, Vorob'ianinov traces the itinerary of the chairs to the Moscow Museum of Furniture. Expecting to fmd them on display, the protagonists learn much to their dismay that the chairs had been recently de-accessioned by the curatorial staff, and will be auc- tioned off as objects lacking in "museum value" (muzeinaia tsennost1).1I A thinly disguised critique of the deplorable state of Soviet museums at the demise of the New Economic Policy, The Twelve Chairs was written dur- ing a period that witnessed the rapid transformation of the state-owned mu- seum in relation to a newly emerging Soviet society. Following the October Revolution, the majority of Soviet museums had been asked to preserve and display those cultural properties that had only recently come under their pur- view, whether objects confiscated from the imperial family itself or, as in the case of the twelve chairs that formerly belonged to the Vorob'ianinov family, materials consolidated from various collections of wealthy landowners and merchants. During the years of War Communism (1918-21) and the New Economic Policy (1921-28), the Soviet museum would evolve from an ex- perimental novelty into a full-blown federation of institutions under the lib- eral leadership of Anatolii Lunacharskii, the People's Commissar of Enlight- enment. Dozens of city palaces and hundreds of country estates belonging to 1. Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, The Complete Adventures of Ostap Bender; Consisting of the Two Novels: The Twelve Chairs and the Golden Calf, trans. by John H. C. Richardson (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 166. ll'ia II'f was a pseudonym of II'ia Fainzil'berg, Evgenii Petrov a pseudonym of Evgenii Kataev. members of the nobility and upper-middle class were transformed virtually overnight into a form of public institution that came to be identified as the "palace-museum" (dvorets-muzei). According to Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov, a leading curator at the State Tret'iakov Gallery in Moscow and one of the most vocal supporters of mu- seum reform at the time, such administrative activity had been absolutely necessary following the revolution: By itself the preponderance of the tasks of collection and preservation during the first years of the revolution was natural and healthy. Life itself demanded it: we had to use all [our] forces for registering and gathering together abandoned and nationalized art. Many museums were over- stocked with the mass of art valuables that arrived and ended up looking like big warehouses.22 This preservationist effort had been broadly supported by both intellectu- als and representatives of the artistic community, despite the fact that neither necessarily sympathized with the stated goals of the revolutionaries. Many members of the educated class simply regarded the new public museum as a place in which to take refuge from the harsh realities of everyday revolution- ary life. Abram Efros, for one, a successful art critic both before and after the revolution, described the fate of Petrograd intellectuals whose homes and possessions had been confiscated by the state, but who were now enjoying all the benefits of their pre-revolutionary lifestyles in their new jobs as state mu- seum officials: Revolution destroyed the man from Petersburg as a collector, but pre- served him as a museum worker. It moved his collection from his house to the State museum. He moved there in its wake as a kind of peculiar addition to it ... now he extends the feeling of private property to the whole museum: the Hermitage is his museum, Gatchina is his palace, and the whole of Petersburg is his city.3 Nevertheless, despite the sudden proliferation of public museums throughout Russia following the revolution, the museum public - a com- pletely new national entity - was thoroughly unprepared for what would be expected of it. 2. Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov, Sovetskii khudozhestvennyi muzei (Moscow: OGIZ-IZOGIZ, 1933), p. 23. 3. Abram Efros, "Peterburgskoe i moskovskoe sobiratel'stvo," Sredi kollektsionerov, 4 (192 1), ), p. 15. .
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