[ppi] [ppiindia] Lenin Lives

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http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/03/31/101.html



      Vladimir Filonov / MT

     
        
Lenin Lives 

An exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see the collection of the now-closed 
Central Lenin Museum. 

By Anna Malpas
Published: March 31, 2006

 

Its exhibits filled 34 rooms of the brick building just off Red Square. The 
shrine to all things connected to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin -- purged of any seedy 
details, naturally -- was practically compulsory viewing for visitors to the 
capital. It was also the place where small Oktyabryata traded in their badges 
to become full-fledged Young Pioneers.

But while other museums of the Soviet era have adapted and survived -- such as 
the Museum of the Revolution on Tverskaya Ulitsa, which is now the Museum of 
the Contemporary History of Russia -- the Central Lenin Museum was one of the 
first victims of the fall of the Soviet Union, closing in 1993. Boris Yeltsin 
donated the building to the Moscow City Duma, but the deputies decided they 
didn't want it.

Since then, its doors have been closed, although on weekends the porch is a 
meeting place for Communist activists selling newspapers and badges. Last year, 
the first Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art housed its main exhibition in the 
museum's empty rooms. Stripped bare, the interior retained little of its 
once-solemn atmosphere. Artists drew on the walls and rigged up a quirky 
installation with a toilet sticking out of one of the windows.

      
But that's not to say the museum's exhibits have been treated in a similarly 
iconoclastic spirit. Numbering around 100,000 items, they are still stored in 
the museum's back rooms, the enormous paintings rolled up to save space. Now, 
the Historical Museum is showing a small part of the collection in an 
exhibition called "Symbols of the Soviet Epoch."

Displayed in a medium-sized room hung with red banners, the exhibits range from 
a waxwork of Lenin created soon after his death to the ponderous gifts given to 
Leonid Brezhnev on the leader's 70th birthday in 1976. The walls are hung with 
giant paintings showing landmarks events of Party history, while glass cases 
contain humbler items such as a red kerchief with the badges of a band of 
Oktyabryata -- the junior equivalent of Young Pioneers -- who visited from Tula 
in 1989.

Exhibitions of Soviet artifacts are nothing new, but somehow the rediscovery of 
items from a museum that no one has visited for 13 years has touched a nerve. 
The fashionable entertainment magazine Afisha gave the show two pages, mostly 
made up of laments that it wasn't big enough. The visitors' book has comments 
that fall roughly into three camps: nostalgic reminiscences, attacks on the 
organizers for glorifying the past, and complaints about climbing three flights 
of stairs to find so little. Radio Liberty did a piece on the exhibition, 
calling it "one-dimensional and openly propagandistic."

The woman behind the exhibition is Tatyana Koloskova. She started working at 
the Central Lenin Museum in 1976 and was one of the deputy directors when it 
closed. Now, she is in charge of a museum that no longer exists, and never 
could exist again, as she freely admits.

Far from the battle-ax type, Koloskova is carefully coiffed and looks a bit 
like the popular actress Lia Akhedzhakova. She was wearing small glasses and a 
colorful stripy top at a Wednesday interview. Contacting her had been a bit of 
a problem, as the museum's communications are evidently stuck in 1993. 
Koloskova said that her telephone had not worked for four months.



      Vladimir Filonov / MT
      
     
The curator was keen to respond to critics of the exhibition. They had missed 
the point, she said. "First of all, they criticize me because the exhibition is 
propagandistic, because it doesn't show the gulag," she commented. "I'm very 
sorry that they didn't understand what we are showing. We are showing the 
collection of the Central Lenin Museum, and the Central Lenin Museum had a 
totally defined task: to form an attachment among simple people to the politics 
and practices of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. And therefore we 
could not have any gulags in the exhibition."

To those who said they wanted more, Koloskova parried, "People write that 
there's too little and that the room is empty, not understanding that this 
emptiness is an exhibit in itself." The message she wants to get across is that 
the scope of the exhibition was intentionally narrow, covering only what she 
called "that limited area of memory that the state considered compulsory for 
its people."

As an example, she pointed to a picture by Vladimir Serov called "Vladimir 
Ilyich Lenin at the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets." It shows Lenin 
addressing an audience of soldiers and workers in a hall hung with chandeliers. 
"That picture was painted for the 30th anniversary of Soviet rule; 30 years had 
passed, and already the real participants of that gathering could not be 
shown," Koloskova said. "Trotsky was there, as were lots of people who by then 
had simply been spirited away to the zone of anti-memory, as I call it."

The original picture, which won a Stalin Prize in 1948, was given to China and 
the artist painted a similar one in 1955, which is the version on display. Not 
long afterward, the goalposts moved again when Nikita Khrushchev condemned his 
predecessor's abuses at the 20th Party Congress in 1956. Josef Stalin had to be 
painted over with an ardent worker carrying a banner. The differences can be 
compared on framed postcards next to the picture.



      Vladimir Filonov / MT

      Isaak Brodsky's painting of a 1920 Comintern Congress was hidden for 
decades because it showed officials who were purged by Stalin.
      
     
Another painting, by court artist Isaak Brodsky, shows the delegates of the 
Second Congress of the Comintern, held in 1920. Since many of them were later 
purged -- including Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev -- the painting was taken 
out of service, only to be shown again in 1989. Museum workers had preserved it 
against official orders.

"The history of creating these pictures is not the history of a state, but the 
history of how the authorities determined what could be remembered," Koloskova 
said.

The daughter of peasant parents who worked her way up to a doctorate, Koloskova 
said that she didn't always look at the museum's paintings this way. She called 
the exhibition "the result of inner work," and said that preserving the 
museum's collection was worthwhile because it was "a complete collection of 
political mythology." 

One figure keeping a conspicuously low profile at the exhibition is Stalin. He 
is represented only by a bust in military uniform, representing victory in 
World War II. "Here he is not the Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin who was 
such-and-such an age, and had such-and-such wrong with him," Koloskova said. 
"In this situation he is a symbol who appropriated, or personified the heroic 
deeds of millions of Russian men."

The Stalin era could certainly be covered in more depth. The museum, which 
first opened in a small way in 1924, moved into its large building on Ploshchad 
Revolyutsii in 1936. One of its aims was veiled, Koloskova said, but 
nonetheless clear: to show that Stalin was marching beside Lenin all the way.

The museum's Stalin-related exhibits were not destroyed after the 20th Party 
Congress, she said. They survive, and she would like to devote an exhibition to 
them. But not yet, she added, saying that the huge paintings -- often 
semi-fictionalized depictions of historical events -- need to be unrolled, 
catalogued and assessed.

Meanwhile, the long-vacant building on Red Square may become a branch of the 
Historical Museum dedicated to the 20th century and displaying some of the 
former exhibits, although the plan has yet to be officially approved. As for 
the Central Lenin Museum itself, there are "no plans," the curator said. "I am 
personally an opponent of restoring something destroyed." 

"Symbols of the Soviet Epoch" (Simvoly Sovetskoi Epokhi) runs to May 22 at the 
Historical Museum, located at 1/2 Red Square. Metro Ploshchad Revolyutsii. Tel. 
692-4019. 


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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