Museums in Revolution
Four historical museums in Moscow

Introduction

This publication deals with the fascinating history, magnificent collections and complicated present situation of four historical museums in Moscow: the Central Lenin Museum, the Museum of the Revolution, the Marx-Engels Museum and the State Historical Reserve 'Gorki Leninskiye'. In Soviet times, these were prestigious institutions, well-funded, housed in prestigious buildings and boasting huge visitor numbers. At present only the Museum of the Revolution is functioning normally, despite severe financial limitations. It broadened its definition of the concept 'revolution' to include the events of 1989 and later. Gorki Leninskiye, only reopened in 1987 after extensive modernizations, receives few visitors and lacks the means to develop its activities. After turbulent events, the Lenin Museum was closed, evicted from its building and continued as a department of the State Historical Museum. This has been closed for many years and will not reopen soon, but at least provides storage and an infrastructure for the collections. The Marx-Engels Museum was literally turned into the street, its building having been allocated to a club of noblemen. The collection found shelter in the former Central Party Archive, which, owing to lack of funding, itself has great difficulties in surviving.

All this has attracted little serious attention, either in Russia or abroad. The Russians themselves are confronted with strange and radical events all the time. Caring about Soviet heritage seems a diversion from more important matters to some, inappropriate nostalgia to others. Researchers and museum professionals from the West are often only interested in getting the information or loan material they want with as little trouble and expense as possible. Each of these points of view may be understandable in itself. But in the meantime, the situation of the museums does not improve and their collections may be running a risk of suffering irreparable damage.

The idea of devoting a publication to these museums was first raised at the 1995 conference of the International Association of Labour History Institutions (IALHI), held in Moscow. After the four museums agreed to contribute texts and illustration material, the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam (IISH) took the responsibility of editing and publishing. Much of the information presented here, in word and image, has not been published before in the West, some of it not even in Russia. Still, this book is not meant as a definitive survey of the subject. It is our intention to draw attention to a group of important but underrated museums, and to contribute to the awareness of their present situation. The following observations may serve as an introduction to the texts on the individual museums, providing some background and additional information.

Moulding history

Few regimes have been more zealous in displaying their view of history in monuments and museums than the communists in the Soviet Union. Only months after their assumption of power in November 1917, Lenin and his colleagues started issuing decrees to replace Tsarist and 'bourgeois' statues with monuments to people they revered, from Spartacus to Karl Marx. They renamed streets, squares and even entire cities. Existing museums were nationalized and adapted to the ruling ideology, new museums were founded to spread this ideology systematically. The Marx-Engels Museum, the Museum of the Revolution, the Central Lenin Museum and the State Historical Reserve 'Gorki Leninskiye' were among the most important. They ranked high in State and Party hierarchy, occupied monumental buildings, had large staffs and ample budgets for exhibitions and acquisitions.

Three of the museums fell directly under the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Only the Museum of the Revolution came under the Ministry of Culture. All four presented history as the Party saw it, in accordance with laws of Marxism. Developments in 19th and early 20th century Europe were shown as a logical chain of events, inevitably leading to and culminating in the Great October Revolution of 1917, with the Bolshevik faction of the Communist Party as the only true revolutionary force and Lenin as its infallible leader. If any attention was given to other trends and groups, it was to demonstrate their insignificance and incompetence. In the 1930's Lenin was in turn replaced as central figure in the museum iconography by Stalin,"the Lenin of our days". The museums were devoted entirely to his glorification and to the sanctifying of his every word. In the Lenin Museum, the halls were even arranged according to the exact order of the chapters of Stalin's famous Short Course History of the All-Union Communist Party, published in 40 million copies in 1938 and required reading for each and every communist.

The frequent revisions of the Stalinist pantheon had to be followed immediately by the museums. Every reference to people who had fallen from grace could be interpreted as counter-revolutionary. For the staff members this meant walking a tightrope, without a safety net. Small 'mistakes' could lead to dismissal, arrest or worse. The Museum of the Revolution had seven different directors between 1933 and 1940. One of them asked Stalin for manuscript pages of his Short Course History. Little did the museum director know that the Short Course was in fact written by a Party commission. Stalin answered he was unable to fulfil the request as he had "burned the manuscript". If this mistake did not mean the director's removal, his next one will have brought him down.

Another tragic example is David Borisovich Ryazanov, the eminent historian and director of the Institute of Marx and Engels and its museum. He was an active, expert collector given great purchasing power. Ryazanov bought from the best antiquarians in Paris and Berlin, and carried off inheritances of important revolutionaries throughout Europe. Despite the increasing pressure, he remained an independent scientist. He also was one of the last high officials who made no secret of his social-democrat convictions. Ryazanov fell victim to the repression in 1931 and was eventually executed in 1938. He was erased from history. So was his Marx-Engels Museum, which offered a broader view on the history of socialism than Party theoreticians liked. Until very recently, the opening date of the museum mentioned in official publications was 1962, which was in fact a reopening after more than twenty years.

The situation became less threatening after Stalin's death in 1953, but political control remained strict. The 'personality cult', meaning the deification of Stalin, was replaced with "propaganda for the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, and for the formation of intellectual and emotional fidelity to the Communist Party's policy and activity", as Tatyana Koloskova of the Lenin Museum states in her article. This is of course not exactly a guarantee for exciting exhibitions. Museums became three-dimensional propaganda brochures, with the themes determined not by the available material or visual attractiveness, but by political content only. Exhibitions sometimes consisted mainly of archival documents, books and brochures, enlivened here and there with an occasional photograph, painting or object.

Despite all this, the museums received huge numbers of visitors. According to official statements made in 1988, the Lenin Museum was visited by 1.5 million people annually, the Museum of the Revolution by a million, Gorki Leninskiye by 700.000 and even the much smaller Marx-Engels Museum by another 90.000. These figures may be exaggerated, but the fact remains that the museums had a definite place in Soviet society and fulfilled roles that Western museums seldom do. They were, among other things, places of ritual and initiation. Most Russian visitors came in groups and had an extensive guided tour that was the highlight of a yearly school or factory excursion. War veterans held meetings and reunions in the museums, decorations of all sorts were solemnly accorded. Perhaps the most curious ritual was the admittance to the communist children's organization, the Pioneers. Young boys and girls would pledge allegiance to Lenin and the Party, one hand on the flag. To take this oath in the Central Lenin Museum was as prestigious to a communist as receiving Holy Communion in St. Peter's in Rome would be to a catholic.

Treasure-chambers of the revolution

Despite all ideological limitations and obstacles, the museums amassed enormous collections. The mere number of items was, and still is, a matter of great pride. Few opportunities are missed to stress the fact that a certain collection is "the largest" or "one of the largest" in Moscow, Russia or the world. And large the collections certainly are: paintings, sculptures, prints, posters, photographs, banners, coins and medals, stamps and all conceivable types of historical objects were gathered by thousands rather than by hundreds. Much attention was also given to collecting books, periodicals, manuscripts and other archivalia, not for research purposes but as exhibition material. There are more aspects that may be surprising at first sight.

In the museums, the Soviet Union presented itself as a unique and blessed country, the first place in the world where the working masses had been freed from oppression. Every scrap of material evidence of the struggle and triumph had to be collected, preserved and exhibited. Soviet leaders like Lenin and Stalin were venerated; every object they had touched became a museum piece, every house they had lived in became a house-museum. But the Russian communists also regarded themselves as the only true inheritors of the tradition of the French Revolution of 1789, the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1870-1871, the scientific socialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and the emerging of socialist parties throughout Europe. Splendid collections on these subjects and persons were gathered, rivalling those in France, Germany and elsewhere, ranging from important works of art to curious historical objects. The Marx-Engels Museum for instance has large collections of engravings on the French Revolution and prints and cartoons by Hogarth, Gillray, Daumier and Doré, but also objects such as the duelling pistols of the German socialist Ferdinand Lasalle, used in his last and fatal fight over a woman, an encryption device used by the German social democrats for encoding secret messages and the pocket knife with which Karl Marx peeled fruit. The provenance of these objects is sometimes almost as interesting as the object itself. Some of the last living participants of the Paris Commune of 1870, for instance, donated a Commune banner to the Soviet Union on the occasion of Lenin's death in 1924. For many years, it was displayed behind Lenin's corpse in the mausoleum on Red Square, testifying that here rested the true heir of the spirit of the Commune. Eventually the banner was transferred to the Lenin Museum.

As far as artistic value is concerned, the collections cover the spectrum from masterpieces of constructivist design and socialist realism to the most curious kitsch. The avant-garde designs for posters, ceramics etc. from the 1920's and early 1930's were already valued highly by museums and collectors in the West when they were still controversial in the Soviet Union. In recent years the socialist realist paintings of Soviet leaders, colossal workers and happy kolchoz farmers have also regularly appeared in exhibitions and publications abroad. At present even the so-called 'Soviet kitsch' is the subject of post-modern interest. And in this field, the revolutionary museums have much to offer, especially in their collections of gifts to Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev. Where the Kremlin treasury is filled with gifts to the Czars, the museums received the floods of gifts to the secretary generals of the Communist Party. No foreign delegation went to the Soviet Union without presents from their homeland, employing local materials and local techniques. Representatives of a mine workers' union would bring a presse-papier made from coal, Persian communists a carpet with communist emblems, workers from a truck factory a model truck. These gifts were not put away in dusty storehouses, but cherished and displayed as tokens of friendship. The absolute highlight in this category is the collection of presents for Stalin's 70th birthday in 1949, now at the Museum of the Revolution. They were on display in the Museum of the Revolution and the Pushkin Museum for almost four years, replacing the ordinary permanent exhibitions and attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Another peculiarity of the Soviet museums was the treatment of reproduced material. To this day, in Gorki Leninskiye massive showcases with thick glass are used for the presentation of photocopied letters. To be fair, the fact that it is a facsimile is mentioned in the caption. It is as if the size and the luxuriousness of the show-case has to enhance the importance of the material, even if it is only a copy. After all, these were the holy scriptures of communism, of which only a few reproductions existed. In the Lenin Museums especially, the use of copies was striking. The Central Lenin Museum in Moscow was designated as the exclusive depository of original objects and art works concerning Lenin. The many satellite museums in the Soviet Union had to make do with copies. In some of them, not a single original was to be seen. Even the Central Lenin Museum itself used replicas. Lenin's flat and working rooms in the Kremlin were preserved in their original state, but the situation did not allow for large numbers of visitors. Therefore, they were meticulously copied in the Lenin Museum, only a few hundred metres from the original. For some years, these rooms were enlivened with a waxen figure of Lenin, whose 'original' could be seen at the mausoleum close by (although there have always been heretics who claimed that this was a replica too...).

1989 and beyond

In 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell and the 'Velvet Revolution' took place in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union began to disintegrate and the Communist Party started losing its power. On May Day 1990, with the traditional parade on Red Square, secretary general Gorbachev was booed by the crowd. At the Party congress in the same year, Boris Yeltsin tore up his membership card in view of the television cameras. In August 1991 Gorbachev was put under house arrest at his holiday address by a group of high Soviet functionaries who opposed his cautious reforms. Yeltsin and a small group of reformers gathered in the White House, the Russian Parliament building. Growing numbers of sympathizers formed a human barricade around it. The planned storming of the building by elite troops never took place, military units began to defect to the Yeltsin camp and the coup perpetrators surrendered. As if to symbolize the break with the communist past, crowds pulled down the statue of Dzerzhinsky, the hated first chief of the secret police, that stood in front of Lubyanka prison. Yeltsin declared the Communist Party illegal, and even sealed the headquarters of the Central Committee. Gorbachev resigned. October 1993 saw the last attempt of a coalition of hardliners and Yeltsin opponents to seize power. Some 200 members of parliament occupied the White House and tried to gain further military and political support from there. Yeltsin succeeded in securing the support of the army, and the White House was shelled by tanks and stormed.

The new rulers erased many traces of the communist epoch. Soviet monuments were removed, Leningrad became St. Petersburg again and even the existence of the sancta sanctorum, Lenin's mausoleum on Red Square, became a matter of debate. Inevitably, the revolutionary museums were afflicted too. Budgets were severely cut, visitors stayed away and many staff members left for other jobs. The museums tried to adapt to the new situation by adapting their exhibitions. Secret documents, forgotten events and persons who had fallen from grace were brought out in the open again. Even so the museums were often seen as representatives of the old system. Few were as stuck, in the literal sense of the word, between reformers and traditionalists as the Lenin Museum in August 1991. When Dzerzhinsky's statue was toppled only a few hundred metres away, staff members guarded the building for fear of its being stormed by the crowds. Instead a group of indignant communists demanded entry to defend the museum. As this would certainly have led to an escalation, the staff had to use all its persuasive powers to keep them out. The vigil lasted three days, then the situation had calmed down. In 1993 the museum was closed. It became a branch of the State Historical Museum, which adopted the collections and part of the staff. The building was allocated to the City Duma.

The Marx-Engels Museum was also closed in 1993. The building had to be vacated at very short notice, and the staff had no option but to put the collections on the pavement, in the freezing cold. As an emergency measure, they were transported to the former Central Party Archive, at present called the Russian Centre for the Conservation and Study of Records for Modern History (RTsKhIDNI). Parts of the collection were already in depot here, because of renovation work in the museum. The temporary solution was turned into a permanent one: the museum now is a department of the archive. Gorki Leninskiye was left almost without funds and visitors. The bus service from the Central Lenin Museum, that annually carried hundreds of thousands of visitors to Gorki, was stopped. The massive new building, with its spacious entrance, marble floors and curious multi-media displays stood empty only a few years after it had been solemnly opened.

Only the Museum of the Revolution survived more or less unharmed. Falling under the Ministry of Culture and not directly under the Communist Party as did the other three museums, it was less controversial to begin with, not as heavily affected by budget cuts and probably a little more flexible in adapting to the new situation. The financial and practical problems the museum faces are huge, but regular opening hours are maintained, the permanent exhibition is in good order, new temporary exhibitions are being made, international projects are undertaken, the collection is safe, acquisition continues and visitor numbers are growing again. Recently the museum even received a decoration from the Yeltsin government for its exhibitions on the 1991 and 1993 revolutions.

There are more bright spots in these difficult times. In the other three museums too the staff is working on new projects, cataloguing collections, lending material to exhibitions abroad and so on. In April 1997, a seminar on 'Lenin Museums in the present Russia' was held in Gorki, where directors of Lenin Museums met for the first time in almost ten years. Events like these seem to indicate that the most difficult stage is over. But more bad news has come. At the moment of writing, electricity in the RTsKhIDNI may be cut off because of debts to the power company. If RTsKhIDNI were to pay these debts (which it cannot), there would be no money left for salaries. If electricity were to be cut off, it is impossible to say when or even if it will be switched on again. And what will happen with the collections in the meantime?

In Russia anything is possible, except predicting the future. But what can be done to help Russia preserve its recent past? It will be clear that the principal problem is of a financial nature. Where there is far too little money for health care or education, one cannot expect lavish subventions for historical museums. On the other hand, substantial improvements could be reached with relatively modest sums. Here the low priority given to the Soviet heritage comes into play. The importance of this heritage is underrated, as are the collections of the museums featured in this publication. International projects for cooperation and support are directed mainly to art museums or to older material. Peter the Great and Catherine the Great are in higher favour with funders than Lenin and Stalin. It would be a tragedy, however, if the communist heritage suffered irreparable damage precisely at the moment when possibilities for a fresh look at recent Russian history are better than they have been for a long time. The museums are eager to make their collections available and show them in Russia or abroad. Practical problems and limitations should not be underestimated, but neither should the ingenuity the museums have developed in solving them.

Marien van der Heijden, 1998