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 o f the Cultural Revolution. The plot o f their novel, The Twelve Chairs, concerns a desperate race to locate a missing fortune in jewels rumored to be hidden in the seat o f one o f 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 auctioned off as objects lacking in "museum value" (muzeinaia tsennost1).1I A thinly disguised critique o f the deplorable state of Soviet museums at the demise o f the New Economic Policy, The Twelve Chairs was written during a period that witnessed the rapid transformation of the state-owned museum 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 purview, 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 o f War Communism (1918-21) and the New Economic Policy (1921-28), the Soviet museum would evolve from an experimental novelty into a full-blown federation of institutions under the liberal leadership of Anatolii Lunacharskii, the People's Commissar o f Enlightenment. Dozens of city palaces and hundreds o f 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 o f the nobility and upper-middle class were transformed virtually overnight into a form o f 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 o f the most vocal supporters o f museum reform at the time, such administrative activity had been absolutely necessary following the revolution: By itself the preponderance o f the tasks of collection and preservation during the first years o f 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 overstocked with the mass o f art valuables that arrived and ended up looking
like big warehouses.2 2

This preservationist effort had been broadly supported by both intellectuals and representatives o f the artistic community, despite the fact that neither necessarily sympathized with the stated goals of the revolutionaries. Many members o f the educated class simply regarded the new public museum as a place in which to take refuge from the harsh realities of everyday revolutionary life. Abram Efros, for one, a successful art critic both before and after the revolution, described the fate o f Petrograd intellectuals whose homes and possessions had been confiscated by the state, but who were now enjoying all the benefits o f their pre-revolutionary lifestyles in their new jobs as state museum officials: Revolution destroyed the man from Petersburg as a collector, but preserved 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 o f 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 completely 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.

The authors o f The Twelve Chairs keenly observed that a type o f museum visitor peculiar to Russia was becoming increasingly evident - the largely uneducated viewer attracted only to the material aspects of museums. This figure, who had only just come into being in Russia with the creation o f the public museum, tended to perceive museums as opulent repositories o f unimaginable decadence: There is a special group o f people in Moscow who know nothing about art, who are not interested in architecture, and who do not like historical monuments. These people visit museums solely because they are housed in splendid buildings. These people stroll through the dazzling rooms, look enviously at the frescoes, touch the things they are requested not to touch, and mutter continually: "My, how they used to live!" ,

They are not concerned with the fact that the murals were painted by the Frenchman Puvis de Chavannes. They are concerned only with how much they cost the former owner o f the house. They go up staircases with marble statues on the landings and try to imagine how many footmen used to stand there, what wages were paid to them, and how much they received in t i p s . . . . In the oak-paneled dining-room they do not examine the wonderful carving. They are troubled by one thought: what the former merchant-owner used to eat there and how much would it cost at present prices?4 While Il'f and Petrov dismissed such fetishistic reactions as provincial, a significant number of theircontemporaries in the art world held the museums and especially their administrators responsible for failing to develop a sufficiently rigorous expository model to educate their public properly about the cultural history of class warfare. Following Stalin's consolidation of power during the Cultural Revolution (1928-1931) and extending throughout the period o f the first Five-Year Plan (1928-1932), the museum as a public institution was subject to intense scrutiny from the radical left. This effort to bring contemporary Socialist cultural criticism to bear on museology gave rise to considerable debate over the function of the museum in the new Soviet society and the correct manner o f bringing the museum into line with the cultural goals of the current administration. If the Soviet arts administration during the NEP period had been most concerned with preserving objects and establishing public collections of
4. Ilf and Petrov, The Complete Adventures of Ostop Bender, pp. 156-57.

exemplary aesthetic value, Soviet museums during the Cultural Revolution became first and foremost pedagogical and propagandistic vehicles for the State, an aspect that was evident both in the emergence of new, text-heavy modes o f exposition, as well as in the leveling o f collections in an effort to introduce balance and uniformity. By 1930, at the First All-Russian Congress o f Museum Workers in Moscow, a consistent although by no means unequivocal museological platform was presented to the public, thereby marking the official end o f the preservationist policy that had governed museum administration during the prior decade. On the eve o f the Cultural Revolution, a new generation o f radical Marxist curators unleashed a broad campaign accusing their predecessors in the museums of fixating on the objects under their purview at the expense o f the audience for which they were responsible. Fedorov-Davydov, for example, associated the materialistic form o f collecting practiced by the palacemuseums and their first curators with "object-fetishism" (veshchnyi fetishizm). Rather than designing a model that would serve the museum's pedagogical goals, he writes: "The ideology o f collecting based on objectfetishism and the bourgeois feeling o f property was demonstrated strikingly in the tendency to transform every palace, country estate and monastery into a separate museum."5 5 This new wave of criticism was by no means limited to the curatorial community. In 1929 Lunacharskii himself was pilloried on the pages o f Daesh (Give), a journal close to the radical October group and directly committed to realizing the goals o f the First Five-Year Plan. An anonymous poem published therein accuses Narkompros in general (and Lunacharskii in particular) of protecting unneeded country estates by turning them into museums. In the style o f political denunciation that was swiftly becoming de rigueur, the poem denigrates him as a "Soviet Maecenas," finding him guilty not only of preserving the past but of appointing former nobles and
other class e n e m i e s as custodians of the palace-museums.6 6

Perhaps not surprisingly, the substantial quantity o f palace-museums soon gave rise to the problem o f how to administer such institutions. According to the radical curators, the palace-museums were ripe for reinstallation precisely because their current exhibitions addressed only the material splendor o f Russia's feudal past. They failed to consider - and did nothing at all to explain to their audiences - the class origins of the forms for which they were responsible. It is this shortcoming to which II'f and Petrov allude indirectly in offering the conventional proletarian response to the art of the preceding epoch ("My, how they used to live!").

5. Fedorov-Davydov, Sovetskii khudozhestvennyi muzei, p. 25. 6. "Velika li tsena-to nashim metsenatam?," Daesh, 8 (1929), p. 12.

Two young curators from Leningrad, Semen Geichenko and Anatolii Shemanskii, pioneered the revision o f the palace-museums, starting work on the reinstallation o f the Gatchina Palace and parts o f the Peterhof Palace Complex in 1927. They were the first to mount slogans and so-called "visual installations" (izo-ustanovki) in the public museum. For Geichenko and Shemanskii the palaces and their contents were best treated as nothing more than "historic documents o f everyday life" (istoriko-bytovoi dokument), an approach that would by extension transform them into "revolutionary museums" (revolutsionnye muzei).' As would soon be the case with other young Marxist curators working throughout the Republic, Geichenko and Shemanskii employed in their installations the principle o f cinematic montage developed earlier by avant-garde filmmakers.8 In the personal rooms of Nicolas I in the Gatchina Palace, for example, they mounted a slogan that proclaimed, "He handicapped Russia for thirty years," adjacent to dozens o f official portraits o f the tsar suspended from the wall at different angles.9 , Geichenko and Shemanskii's experimental installations were soon imitated throughout the major museums o f Moscow and Leningrad, many o f whose curators at least initially mistakenly perceived the beginning o f the Cultural Revolution as a return to the ideals of War Communism, believing the retreat o f NEP to be finished. In reality, the Cultural Revolution would manifest itself in the halls o f the public museum not so much through formal experimentation as in a new, more ideologically rigorous model of exposition. Grounded in the propagandistic presentation of objects, heavily mediated by text, this model would be stressed by the well-known Leningrad art historian Fedor Shmit in his major 1929 study Museum Work: Questions o f Exposition. Shmit argued that the most effective form o f propaganda would be completely hidden from view: From the state point o f view museums either should not exist at all or should be socio-educational institutions willingly attended by people because they are "interested" . . . and can be educated in a direction desirable for the state without noticing it.'o
7. Anatolii Shemanskii and Semen Geichenko, Poslednie Romanovy v Petergofe. Putevoditel' po nizhnei dache i vagonam (Moscow-Leningrad: Gos. lzd. izobrazitel'nykh iskusstv, 1933), p. 4. 8. The influence of avant-garde film montage on the Marxist curators is described in Fedorov-Davydov, Sovetskii khudozhestvennyi muzei, pp. 60-61. 9. Gichrrye komnaty Nikolaia L Gatchina (Leningrad: OGIZ, 1928). Postcard in the authors' collection. 10. Fedor Shmit, Muzeinoe delo. Voprosy ekspozitsii (Leningrad: Academiia, 1929), p. 82; see also Theodore Schmit, "Les Musdes de 1'Union des Rpubliques Socialistes Sovietiques," Les Cahiers de la Rpublique des lettres, des sciences et des arts, 13 (1931), pp. 206-21. 1.

The next year, the Tret'iakov Gallery in Moscow was the site o f the "Exhibition o f Revolutionary and Soviet Thematics" in which Fedorov-Davydov attempted to introduce subtle forms o f persuasive propaganda, whose presence was intended to assist in advancing the claims o f the exposition. In addition to mounting political slogans alongside paintings drawn from the museum's permanent collection, he installed such novel supplementary materials as photographs and film stills, whose presence was intended to reinforce the claims of the exhibition." I T At least initially, this freedom to experiment in the realm o f the propagandistic exhibition seems to have led some museum curators to include unconventional materials in their installations and to abandon the structure and design o f the traditional, aestheticized art exhibition. In 1930, for example, the State Russian Museum in Leningrad organized an exhibition of "War and Art," going so far as to recreate trenches in one hall, frame battle paintings in barbed wire and gas masks, and project a rotating selection of slides, including images of St. George and military propaganda posters depicting Russian Cossacks impaling German soldiers. 12 By the beginning of 1930, however, the radical Marxist curatorial community had begun to express serious reservations about the effectiveness of experimenting with exhibition design and incorporating unconventional materials into the permanent galleries of the public museum. Neither practice was considered appropriate and they were shortly expunged altogether. Numerous apologists for incorporating everyday objects into museum galleries suddenly found themselves accused of defending formalism (the history o f style without any discursive Marxist exposition of form). Within short order, experimental display practices came to be regarded as best reserved for temporary exhibitions, as demonstrated in two important such installations that year: Aleksandr Rodchenko's "Anti-Pope" exhibition in the Moscow Planetarium'3 and the "Imperialist War" exhibition in the Gor'kii Park o f Culture and Rest (Moscow). 14 The failure of radical experimental display practices pointed to the rising need among Soviet curators to establish more firmly an ideological underpinning to their expositions. For most o f the previous century, museums across the West had privileged nationality, chronology and the biography of the artist (in descending order o f importance) as the essential criteria through which to make sense of the history o f art. By the late 1920s, this expository model

11. A. Grech, "Exhibitions o f Revolutionary and Soviet Thematics," VOKS, 6-7 (1930), pp. 71-78. 12. Fedorov-Davydov, Sovetskii khudozhestvennyi muzei, p. 62. 13. Anna Karavaeva, "Ob odnoi poleznoi vystavke. Iz dnevnika pisatelia," Literaturnaia gazeta, no. 22, June 2, 1930. 14. Fedorov-Davydov, Sovetskii khudozhestvennyi muzei, p. 61.

had come to be perceived in the Soviet Union as a function of bourgeois ideology, hostile in other words to the interests o f the proletariat. During the period of the Cultural Revolution, Soviet curators explored several alternative expository models for making their arguments more ideologically transparent. Each o f these models had in common the de-sacralization of the museum object. The expository paradigm that emerged from this period o f crisis as the preferred means o f presenting the history o f art as the reflection of class struggle came to be known as the "complex Marxist exposition" (kompleksnaia marksistskaia ekspozitsiia).ls The single most important expository transformation during this period was the privileging of text over image, the grand narrative that would govern the sequence of objects in each installation. The reign o f the discursive would be evident in the dominating text panels that came to be ubiquitous in installations across the Soviet Union. Equally important was the policy o f transferring objects among museums in order to balance collections. Those museums unable to procure examples o f the period styles they needed for their juxtapositions opted willingly for copies and reproductions; those curators found guilty o f overvaluing the originality and uniqueness o f objects in their collections were subject to scathing critique. Related to this desire to establish balanced historical installations was a trenchant resistance to maintaining collections exclusively devoted to media historically favored by the ruling classes (furniture, porcelain, etc.). Finally, certain curators pushed to introduce examples o f proletarian art into their galleries, arguing that the juxtaposition o f art by different classes would make eminently clear the cultural history of their struggle. The predominance o f text is evident in its presence in virtually every aspect of the Marxist exposition: catalogues o f all types abounded and slogans o f all sorts appeared in different configurations above and adjacent to the objects on display. In such installations, art was typically relegated to the role o f illustration, with text providing the narrative. In Kiev in 1931, for example, Sergei Gil'iarov, the curator o f the Museum of the Ukrainian Academy o f Science, reinstalled the museum's permanent collection according to this new museological model (Figs. 1-2). Gil'iarov's exposition was deprived of such creative constructivist elements as visual installations and reduced to the use of slogans and wall labels explaining the class character o f the exhibited paintings. 16 Such privileging o f text speaks undoubtedly to a pervasive
15. A. Fedorov-Davydov, "Nekotorye voprosy rekonstruktsii Tret'iakovskoi galerei," in Sovetskii muzei. Bulleten' Gosudarstvennoi Tret'iakovskoi galerei i Gosudarstvennogo Muzeia novogo zapadnogo iskusstva (Moscow: Izd. Gos. Tret'iakovskoi galerei, 1930), pp. 6-10. 16. By the time the installation was organized the museum had already lost to Gostorg such masterpieces as Adam and Eve by Lucas Cranach the Elder and a French tapestry of The Adoration of the Magi, dated 1512.

iconophobia, a deep distrust among museum administrators of the public's ability to glean the history o f form independently of textual assistance. The texts mounted in the galleries were hardly limited to political slogans. Natalia Kovalenskaia, a curator at the Tret'iakov Gallery, composed a typology o f texts to be integrated into the ideal Marxist display: We must add not only schemes and diagrams depicting the development of the socio-economic process, but also absolutely concrete visual material exposing class ideology - quotes from archival documents and press publications, from social and political journalism and state decrees,
from m e m o i r s and fiction literature."

Very soon, the proliferation o f textual materials in the museums became so pervasive that the latter began publishing specialized guides to negotiating the myriad discursive supplementary panels. There was some debate as to the kinds o f texts appropriate for museum installations; at the State Russian Museum in Leningrad, for ,example, extracts drawn from the writings of prerevolutionary participants in the Russian avant-garde were paradoxically juxtaposed with examples o f the art they had produced. For the most part, however, the radical curators uniformly agreed that they would have to provide definitive, textual arguments for those objects they placed on display, leaving as little space as possible for alternative interpretations. As it was not always possible to obtain those objects they sought for their ambitious installation plans, Marxist curators initiated a reshuffling of Soviet museum collections. This program would, it was hoped, both facilitate the creation of complex Marxist exhibitions and at the same time help combat the object-fetishism associated with the old curatorial regime. Often objects were transferred among museum collections (a practice that involved shifting the title o f ownership) or simply confiscated from those museums that had been closed during the museum reform period as ideologically dangerous (as was the fate, for example, o f the Moscow Museum of Furniture). Such transfers o f objects among museums was met with fierce hostility by members of the old curatorial regime, who sought to preserve the composition of the former private collections as holistic entities. Fedorov-Davydov noted the resistance among older museum officials to the prospect of transferring objects from their own collections to other institutions: The majority of art museums are still immersed in object-fetishism. They treasure their pieces for their own sake and not for their function.
17. Nataliia Kovalenskaia, Putevoditel' po opymoi kompleksnoi marksistskoi ekspozitsii (Moscow: lzd. Gos. Tret'iakovskoi galerei, 1931), p. 6.

They do not want and cannot understand that the most striking painting, vase, sculpture, drawing has no value for this museum if it is unique, if there are no other objects from the same epoch, in the same style, and that such pieces must be transferred to other museums. "Feudalism," the system of "isolated economy" is reigning in museums. Each museum thinks only about itself, preserves pieces only for itself, clings to every object that it knows to be rare, and equates the transfer of such objects to another museum as a fate equal to their destruction. Until today, rarities have been more important to museums than the meaning and tasks of museum work. 18 For the radical Marxists, however, such institutions as the Ostroukhov collection, the Tsvetkov Gallery, or the Shchukin and Morozov museums - all museums formed from private collections - were little more than anachronistic monuments to the idea o f the bourgeois collector and his particular tastes.'9 The new generation had no interest in maintaining the historic unity of the great Russian private collections; by contrast, they privileged above all the master Marxist narratives they sought to install in their respective museums. By the early 1930s, the transfer o f objects among museums had become fairly commonplace as a practice. Wriat had previously been perceived as an unassailable museological entity - the historic collection shaped by an individual temperament - had been swiftly and mercilessly dismantled. Marxist curators faced not only the problem o f enriching the collections of the museums for which they were responsible. They often fought as well to diminish the vast and overwhelming quantity of objects that had been accessioned by their museums. This concern was voiced especially among radical curators at the palace-museums and estate-museums, which had been the recipients o f excessive quantities o f all sorts o f materials, from painting and sculpture to the applied arts. This surfeit, they complained, was in turn giving rise to an experience among museum visitors that bordered on aesthetic rapture. At the 1930 Congress o f Museum Workers, this concern with the surplus quantity of art objects in the palace-museums was addressed in the form of a directive to begin diminishing collections: The elevated position (of works o f art in the palace-museums) has to be r e d u c e d . . . by the substantial addition o f clearly historical material, by the removal o f all artworks not needed by that particular museum (in its function) as a museum o f the history o f everyday life. Artistic ensembles (buildings, parks, interiors) do not have the utmost importance.
18. Fedorov-Davydov, Sovetskii khudozhestvennyi muzei, p. 29. 19. Ibid., pp. 24-25.

They must be used as a moment (an element) in the exposition specifically to demonstrate the parasitic existence of the aristocracy, (to demonstrate) the role o f art in creating an aesthetic pedestal and a barrier between the ruling group and the masses, in creating the eternal feast but not the real everyday life o f the epoch. Any other demonstration will turn into an excessive aesthetic apologia for serfdom (and will) hide the economic roots of the beastly essence o f its exploitation. 20 Described thus as an impediment to the proper mission of the museum, the glut o f materials in public collections would henceforth be addressed by facilitating loans, exchanges, or simply direct transfers of objects among institutions. In much the same spirit, those curators who suffered from a lack of sufficient materials and who were unable to obtain specific objects to complete their historical narratives were encouraged to enhance their installations by using surrogates. Their exhibitions would include plaster copies and reproductions (typically photographs or prints) of those objects they were not able to obtain by transfer or exchange. As Fedorov-Davydov argued at the 1930 Congress o f Museum Workers, "Because the central task of the art museum is to demonstrate the processes of art and not separate objects, it can and must use reproductions and plaster copies together with originals when necessary."21 Maintaining the integrity and coherence of the historical narrative was clearly more of a priority than honoring the aura of the original object. For some curators, the key issue was not so much the privileging o f objects as the privileging o f certain kinds o f objects. Kovalenskaia, who had helped design the "First Experimental Marxist Exposition" at the Tret'iakov Gallery in 1929, was one such curator, objecting specifically to the way in which museums had traditionally privileged those media historically supported by the ruling classes. In giving preference to easel painting and monumental, representational sculpture, she observed, museums were ignoring the "art of the oppressed classes," whatever form it might have taken throughout the ages. She thus proposed bringing the two into direct contact with one another in order to illuminate class contradictions: It is necessary to include the art o f the lower classes, which until now has not been researched and in general has not been treated like art and has been collected only by museums of everyday l i f e . . . . By contrasting such art with the art o f the upper classes we are able to show class con20. Pervyi Vserossiiskii muzeinyi s'ezd Tezisy dokladov (Leningrad: Leningradskii oblastnoi otdel' Soiuza rabotnikov prosveshcheniia. Muzeinaia komissiia, 1930), p. 49. 21. Ibid., p. 53.

tradictions visually and to demonstrate class struggle sharply. Displaying such material in museums is necessary even for the purpose o f destroying the legend o f the coherent flow o f the nation's art, a legend that supports the classless understanding of art. 22 This kind o f visual juxtaposition, through which the history o f style was interpreted as a reflection of the history of class struggle, retained traces of the formalist models from which it was derived. Fedorov-Davydov, one of its most prominent proponents, explained that he had arrived at this model of comparative exposition by merging contemporary Marxist theory with the art-historical methodology o f Heinrich Wolfflin and certain figures from the Vienna School. 23 In their sensitivity to secondary media, the radical curators were following in the footsteps of Wilhelm von Bode, the legendary curator of the KaiserFriedrich-Museum in Berlin, who some thirty years earlier had sought to install applied art and furniture alongside representational art in his installations .24 Unlike Bode, however, they sharply rejected the possibility that certain types o f applied art might on their own reveal the class history o f form. One o f the museums most commonly derided for failing to develop balanced collections was the Moscow Museum o f Furniture, which had been subject to such condescension by Il'f and Petrov. As Federov-Davydov argued, the museum embodied the concept o f the fetishistic ideology of collectors, according to which the class history of form is not revealed: Two museums o f applied arts were formed, separated according to types o f material: the Museum o f Porcelain and the Museum o f Furniture. These two museums were the apogee of formalist creativity and the bourgeois-fetishistic ideology o f collectors. Their collections were sorted in a formalist-descriptive way, according to countries, periods and prod u c e r s . . . . By the very nature of their collections these museums were deprived of the possibility o f showing the history of art as the change and the struggle o f class ideologies.25 The new Marxist expositions would thus necessarily incorporate a wide range o f media and would do so with an eye not just to elucidating the evolu-

22. Kovalenskaia, Putevoditel' po opytnoi kompleksnoi marksistskoi ekspozitsii, p. 4. 23. Fedorov-Davydov, "Nekotorye voprosy rekonstruktsii Tret'iakovskoi galerei," pp. 6-10. 24. Wilhelm von Bode, Museumsdirektor und M6zen: Wilhelm von Bode zum 150. Geburtstag der Kaiser-Friedrich-Museums-Verein (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 1995). 25. Fedorov-Davydov, Sovetskii khudozhestvennyi muzei, pp. 35-36.

tion o f style, but to determining how those media had been favored historically by one class or another. As the state transformed its museums into weapons of ideological struggle, it sought out new means to practice effective political indoctrination. From 1927 the leading Soviet museums created specialized internal departments that would be responsible for both museum education and statistical investigations into the preferences and demographics of their constituents. We might construe such research and practices as an early form of political profiling, which would in turn help the museums develop more sophisticated and increasingly refined forms o f propaganda. Statistical surveys show that from the beginning o f the First Five-Year Plan the composition of museum visitors was changing rapidly. Increasingly, the museum audience was comprised of urban workers and proletarians, Red Army soldiers and Soviet officials. The number of rural peasants visiting museums remained miniscule and no effort was made to address this lack.26 Many of the major museums organized specialized guided tours through their collections during'this period, in part to address particular interest groups. In 1927, for example, the Tret'iakov developed a series o f excursions through its permanent galleries, the itineraries of which were very carefully orchestrated: "The Lives of Different Classes before the Revolution"; "The Life of the Serf in His Environment"; "Merchants, Workers, Peasants"; "Everyday Life and the Development of Industrial Forms"; "The Reflection of Capitalist Formations in Painting and Sculpture"; "Religion in the Service of the Tsarist Government. ,,27 The sudden arrival at the doors of the museum o f great quantities o f uneducated masses made for some interesting and unanticipated results. Workers and soldiers perceived the art hanging on the walls of the museum to be illustrations of Tsarist Russia's dark and sordid past. After visiting the Tret'iakov Gallery, for example, the workers in the bakery o f the main political department of the secret police (OGPU) wrote that they greatly enjoyed the tour, which helped them to understand the past, and that anybody wanting to know how difficult life had been under the tsars need only visit the museum.28 Statistical research undertaken by the museum indicates that ninety-eight percent of its visitors were interested in nineteenthcentury realist art; by contrast virtually none mentioned either religious icons or modern art. This passion for narrative painting was apparent in the unriv a l e d popularity of Il'ia R e p i n ' s I v a n the Terrible Killing his S o n (1885).29

26. A. Moizes. "Ekskursionnaia zhizn' Tret'iakovskoi galerei," in Izuchenie muzeinogo zritelia (Moscow: lzd. Gos. Tret'iakovskoi galerei, 1928), p. 19. 27. Ibid., p. 19. 28. Ibid., p. 26. 2Ibid., pp. 20-23. 9

The museum reform movement was officially institutionalized during the 1930 Congress of Museum Workers. By this year, the preservationist approach to museology had clearly fallen out o f favor in the upper ranks of Soviet cultural administration in favor o f a model that privileged ideological interpretation. Andrei Bubnov, who had succeeded Lunacharskii the previous year in the role o f People's Commissar of Enlightenment, delivered a speech via proxy that made eminently clear the administration's position. In contrast to his predecessor, Bubnov could hardly be accused of soft liberalism. His speech, relentless and unapologetic, effectively implicated the earlier generation o f museum curators - those objecting to the new ideological museology - in undermining the state, a rhetorical gesture popularized by Stalin in linking class struggle to the construction o f Socialism: Class resistance o f the elements hostile to Socialism found its reflection in this zone o f cultural building. A certain number o f museum offir cials are resisting reorganizing museums according to the new model. This is provoking to a considerable extent the question about museum cadres.3o The People's Commissar further announced the beginning of a campaign to purge museums of those curators who still persisted in clinging to the object-oriented museological model preferred by the West: "We don't need a museum-Kunstkammer. We must destroy reactionary slavery to routine in the construction o f museums."3' After 1930, the metaphor preferred by the Marxist curators to describe their activities was that of the "Third Front." As Shemanskii and Geichenko wrote: Now the working class, which prevailed on the political and industrial fronts, is realizing the tasks o f the third front - the cultural one. It studies to understand the past and to consciously lay the foundation of a new socialist s y s t e m u s i n g this understanding.32 -

If the "first front" was that of political struggle, and the second that o f industrialization, then the trenches o f the third front were to be found in the museum halls. This was the front o f Cultural Revolution. Such an application of militaristic rhetoric was typical o f official party documents of the time and extended readily to decrees on the subject o f museum reform, which in many
30. Andrei Bubnov, 0 muzeiakh. Privetstvie i rech' na 1-m Muzeinom s"ezde (MoscowLeningrad: Narodnyi kommisariat prosveshcheniia RSFSR, 193 1), ),p. 5. 31. Ibid., p. 5. 32. Shemanskii and Geichenko, Poslednie Romanovy v Petergofe, pp. 6-7.

ways lead to the destruction o f the last ideologically hostile representatives of the interwar intelligentsia. The casualties of this campaign, however, were not only the old generation o f museum curators, those seeking only to preserve the objects in their collections. They included as well thousands of works of art sold abroad by Gostorg, the State Department of Trade. To a great extent, the museum reform movement of the Cultural Revolution facilitated the sale of art from Russian collections. Museum objects had already been deprived o f an aura o f indispensability, having been deemed reproducible or replaceable through surrogate copies. Indeed, the unique work of art had come to be regarded as inexpedient precisely because Marxist installations avoided discussion o f distinctiveness and idiosyncrasy whenever possible. Conversely, one can argue that the sales even helped realize the dream o f the radical Marxist curators, in drastically diminishing the quantity of art objects with which they had to concern themselves in the palacemuseums. Those who opposed the sales soon found themselves politically marginalized, and were given no outlet through which to voice their objections. Nevertheless, the connection between the museum reform movement and the secret sales did not go unnoticed. Panteleimon Romanov mentioned it obliquely in his dramatic novel, Three Pairs of Silk Stockings: A Novel of the Life of the Educated Class under the Soviet, published in two parts in 1931. Romanov's s story brilliantly addresses the rising tension between those curators of an older generation who devoted themselves to preserving and cataloguing objects and those administrators o f the new regime charged with bringing the museum into line with the goals o f the Cultural Revolution. Set in Moscow, in the early years of the First Five-Year Plan, the story unfolds in an ambiguous civic institution referred to only as the Central Museum. For Romanov, this generational tension cannot be separated from the class conflict endemic to the period. The museum's curatorial staff, all educated members o f the intelligentsia, find themselves at the mercy o f a newlyappointed director, Andrei Zakharovich Polukhin, a university-trained member o f the working class dedicated to bringing the street (that is to say, Communist scouts and workers) into the museum. Polukhin - who sports a stern and unblinking glass eye that strikes fear into the hearts of his staff - makes clear his intention to make curatorial science immediately available to the working class, to make the museum "useful," in a word, by having exhibits that "show the road on which we have advanced and on which we are now advancing."33 Much to the chagrin o f his curators, he speaks contemptuously
33. Panteleimon Romanof, Three Pairs of Silk Stockings: A Novel of the Life of the Educated Class under the Soviet, trans. by Leonard Zarine (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 193 1), p. 109.

of the Central Museum's collection, dismissing a precious bed and several helmets formerly belonging to Tsar Nicolas I as mere "relics" and "dead things."34 At one point, while walking home from work with his chief curator and confidant, Ippolit Grigorevich Kisliakov, the director stands admiringly before a series of massive construction sites, bemoaning the fact that while the signs and symbols of the new Russia rise from the ruins o f the old, he is reduced to "protecting tombstones and tsars' beds."35 While his curators insist on carefully documenting the objects under their purview, Polukhin's ultraleftist view o f history, hardly a rarity among members of his generation, places singular importance on the revolution, by extension diminishing the status of everything that preceded it: The various articles and exhibits [in the museum] only had value in his eyes according to the extent to which they reflected the revolutionary process: the extent to which they were essential to the revolution. To him past history was merely a prologue to the revolution, or, more rightly,
s o m e t h i n g t h a t h a d i m p e d e d it.36

Regarding his collection with a mixture o f "indifference and almost animosity," Polukhin has no reservations about selling off objects that would bring badly needed food and materials to his countrymen. Indeed, the art o f the pre-revolutionary period for him seems little more than a fossil from a bygone era, a species of object that no longer has a place in society, much less a public museum: "These foreigners - what good have they been to us?" he once said to Kisliakov. "Take this clever painter, I am told they will give money for his works abroad." "Which clever painter?" _ "The one in the comer hall." "Rembraridt?" "Yes, but what use is he to us? I don't understand him. Pictures are all the same. Neither will the workers u n d e r s t a n d . . . . Such things may be appreciated, perhaps by about a hundred people throughout the whole o f the Soviet Union. O f what importance is it that they understand? . . . You must realize that we are working away from these Old Masters, not towards them. Perhaps art will now follow quite a different course and if
34. Ibid , pp. 72 and 109 respectively. 35. Ibid., p. 157. 36. Ibid, p. 236.

we try to learn from these (pictures) we shall only get c o n f u s e d . . . . We have now to think about food and machines. If they will give us machinery for these pictures, then w e m u s t use the opportunity."37

Polukhin and his generation, as it turns out, would not have to wait long. Independent Scholar and Florida State University

37. Ibid, p. 238.

Fig. 1: Exposition of Spanish paintings,. Slogan placed over the paintings says: "Spain 17th century. Art at service of the crowned degenerates and the church." Courtesy of the authors.

Fig. 2: Exposition of the Flemish paintings. Slogan placed over the paintings says: "Flanders of the end of the 16th - the 17"' centuries. Art of agrarian aristocracy and merchant bourgeoisie." On the left: "Everyday life of working peasants in imagination of the ruling class." On the right: "Luxurious life and hedonistic attitudes of the social upper strata." Courtesy o f the authors.