As a species, we are hunter-gatherers. Since at least the beginning of recorded time we have sought and collected talismans and artifacts from previous generations and parallel cultures, in order to connect with other members of the human race across space and time, in order to curate stories about ourselves.
Connections and stories, after all, are what define us, and museums are the places where we gather our visual aids. So when three authors came to Russian Life about the same time last year, wanting to share the story of different museums – two in Russia and two in Ukraine, we decided we would see what happened if we pulled them all together in a single issue. And, not knowing what to expect, we had no way of anticipating where their stories would take us.
To be clear: these are not the big, state-run museums tourists normally visit in the two Russian capitals. In fact, all of them are decidedly small, and singularly-focused. But that does not make them any less significant or important.
There are thousands of such small museums all across Russia and the former USSR. And what many of them share (other than their diminutive size) is that they were started, and are now curated and maintained, by passionate local enthusiasts.
The focus of their passions is wildly diverse, and so the stories they tell take us to unexpected places, from a famous ballet master to a famous dam, from the Thaw to the sea.
Perm, a million-resident city on the banks of the Kama River (the city’s name means “faraway land” in Finno-Ugric), was the childhood home of ballet impresario Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev. Born in 1872, Diaghilev moved to St. Petersburg at a young age and there (when just 26) helped found World of Art – one of the first and most prominent Russian art journals (and before that a vibrant art movement) of the last century. Yet he is best known for being the creator of Ballet Russes, the ballet company that united some of the most distinguished names in Russian art: composer Igor Stravinsky, ballerina Anna Pavlova, and pioneer of the Russian avant-garde, Natalia Goncharova. In the words of Coco Chanel, Ballet Russes “introduced Russia to the West.”
For most of the last century, few could identify the former Diaghilev residence in Perm, or even knew of the building’s existence. The Diaghilev family, which had long lived beyond its means, was bankrupted in 1890 and left Perm for St. Petersburg soon thereafter. Later, their nineteenth century home (built in 1852), became a bank and then a women’s gymnasium*; in 1926 it was converted into Gymnasium Number 11 – an unremarkable, slightly unkempt school.
Diaghilev was living in Paris when the Bolshevik revolution took hold, and he refused to return to Russia, earning him the everlasting approbation of Soviet authorities; he was etched out of Russian artistic history for much of the century that followed.
Perm, meanwhile, became a thriving regional industrial capital and a center for the development of artillery. Thus closed to foreigners, its isolation and the impresario’s anti-Soviet reputation served to obscure the city’s Diaghilev legacy for decades.
Then along came Raisa Zobacheva. A loyal Permian, Zobacheva, now a silver-haired, 74-year-old, knows how the sun sets here, how the earth smells, and what color the snow is in the mountains. She believes in the energy of the Urals – the energy she insists infected the young Diaghilev and made him great.
And, notably, Raisa Zobacheva is a different woman because of Diaghilev. She became director of Gymnasium Number 11 in 1975 and founded Dom Diaghilev (“Diaghilev House”), the city’s memorial museum, in 1987. “Coming to this building was destiny,” she said.
It’s hard to dispute. Perm is a different city because of Zobacheva.
In the 1980s, scholars flooded to Russia, eager to uncover history that had been lost to Soviet censorship and carelessness. Perm was no exception; scholars arrived to learn more about Diaghilev, the legendary impresario. They searched local archives and made expeditions to his family’s residence. A series of conferences called Diaghilev Chteniya (“Readings”) were held to present new findings. And then, in order to make those findings more permanent, to share them more widely, Zobacheva created Dom Diaghilev.
When the “museum” first opened, it was just a few stands in the corridor of the school. Family heirlooms were brought back from expeditions to the southern part of Perm krai, where Diaghilev’s grandfather had owned a distillery. Eventually, the museum expanded to the room that had once been the estate’s parlor, in order to make room for family photographs and furniture.
Today, the building has been declared an “object of cultural legacy” and is under the protection of the Russian government. It receives funding from the Ministry of Education (because of its affiliation with a gymnasium), and from LUKOIL, the gas-conglomerate headquartered in the city.
Museum Director Elena Bobrova, who has a soft voice and trusting, brown eyes, relates to a visitor the story behind each object. In one corner of the parlor room is a dark piano with a plush, velvet bench. “This is where his father sang at the piano... his aunt, Alexandra, was a famous soprano, you know!”
Across from the piano is a collection of ballet costumes from Swan Lake, wispy tutus proudly jutting into the room. On the walls hang Leon Bakst’s costume sketches for Firebird and ballet posters in bright pinks and deep reds.
The city is not far away, and the rumble of street traffic can be heard even through the thick plaster walls of this candy-yellow palace once known to locals as “Perm’s Athens” or the “Place of the Muses.”
“It would be strange if nothing was going on here,” Bobrova said. Young men read poems and famous vocalists performed. The young Diaghilev grew up surrounded by the arts.
After Zobacheva finished filling up the parlor, the space returned to its original function and has become a weekly meeting place for the city’s intelligentsia.
Exiting the parlor, one meets the impresario himself, or rather a life-sized imitation. Fantastical, ingenuous, chilling – the sculpture was one of Ernst Neizvestny’s last works before his death; he donated the statue to the museum in 2007. Other treasured exhibits include metal and porcelain busts of the impresario donated by Maria Tretyakova in 2012.
The corridor beyond leads to the gymnasium proper. Zobacheva renamed the gymnasium in 1992, integrating Diaghilev’s name in the title. At Diaghilev Gymnasium Number 11 students study French, graphic arts, choreography, and perform The Nutcracker. The school and museum are intricately bound: students lead museum tours in Russian, English, and French; Bobrova is the director of the “moral program” at the gymnasium, while continuing to fill her role as museum director; ethnography and drama teachers consult on museum events.
Employees and students speak of the impresario as if he were personally involved in he museum’s founding.
“We joke that Sergei Pavlovich blessed us with great acoustics,” Bobrova said in reference to the concert hall.
“This house gave him strength,” Zobacheva said, standing next to the family piano in the parlor room.
And then there is the Diaghilev Festival – a celebration of Russian culture that (according to its website) “aims at maintaining and developing the traditions of the eminent impresario and promoter of Russian culture, Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev.” Begun in 2003, the ten-day biennial festival is a continuation of the Diaghilev Chteniya conferences: Dom Diaghilev and the Perm Opera and Ballet host a variety of events that include everything from performances of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich to concerts by Grouper, an American solo-project that identifies itself as Lo-Fi, dream-pop, and drone-ambient.
Zobacheva, who has been widely honored – Woman of the Year, Perm Oblast, 2006; Best Pedagogue in Russia, 2013 – and who received a medal from UNESCO – believes there are plenty more things to do. Not least of these is to name a Permian street after Sergei Pavlovich (Paris, for its part, has a Diaghilev Square).
“How can we not give tribute to this kind of Russian figure?” she said.
– Nicole Steinberg
In 1964, Kyiv (Kiev) National University commissioned artwork to commemorate the 150th anniversary of birth of writer and artist Taras Shevchenko. The display was intended to decorate a hallway at the University. The Artists’ Union selected Ukrainian artists Alla Gorska and Liudmila Semikina for the task; they collaborated with Galina Sevruk on a stained-glass panel designed by the painter Opanas Zalivakha.
The group produced a sketch for the artwork, titled “Shevchenko. Mother,” and the design was immediately approved. But later, when the finished work of stained glass was installed at the University, it was immediately deemed inappropriate and removed: the dean himself destroyed it with a hammer.
What was the problem? First, it looked like Shevchenko and Ukraine were behind bars. What’s more, from certain angles, the book that Shevchenko was holding looked like a knife! Neither of these problems were evident in the sketch. The panel was deemed “ideologically hostile” and Gorska was evicted from the Artists’ Union.
Today, over half a century later, a recreation of the Gorska-Semikina glass installation is the first exhibition piece at the Ukrainian Museum of the Shestidesyatniki.
The shestidesyatniki – the name in Russian means “people active in the 1960s” – mostly born after World War II, were in their twenties when Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s cult of personality and began the period that has come to be known as The Thaw (1956-1964). Young and idealistic, the shestidesyatniki hoped for political and cultural reform in the Soviet Union, and were active in public affairs. After Khrushchev’s ouster, repression of liberal artists, writers and activists followed. Many members of the movement were either killed or sent to labor camps; or both.
The Museum of the Shestidesyatniki opened in Kyiv in 2012. Mykola Plakhotniuk, the museum’s founder, was himself a shestidesyatnik. As a physician working near Kyiv, he had published an article in the samvydav (underground publication) journal Ukraïnskyi visnyk. In the article he defended several political prisoners and analyzed the process of “Russification” (cultural assimilation) in Dnipropetrovsk. As a result, Plakhotniuk lost his position at the Kyiv Medical Institute and was arrested in January 1972, sentenced to an indefinite term in special psychiatric hospitals in Dnipropetrovsk, Kazan, and Smila. After being released in March 1981, he was re-arrested in September and sentenced the following year to four years in labor camps.
Alla Gorska, one of the artists who produced “Ukraine. Mother,” was emblematic of the activity and fate of the shestidesyatniki. A young artist and a monumentalist painter, Gorska was a founder and active member of the Club of Creative Youth, established in Kyiv in 1962; the group of young artists played a pivotal role in the cultural movement of the 1960s. Gorska often worked with other artists to produce monumental interior and exterior paintings and mosaics used to decorate schools, museums, and restaurants in the Soviet Union.
Despite her open activism, the authorities could not touch her, even though they arrested her friends and colleagues: Gorska’s father was a prominent, officially approved film director; a public scandal would have been unavoidable.
But one day in 1970 Gorska received a phone call from her father-in-law, who asked her to pick up her sewing machine from his dacha. She went and never returned. She was later found by her friends in her father-in-law’s basement. The old man himself was found dead at the train station.
The official version of the story was that Gorska’s father-in-law had killed her, and then committed a suicide. Her friends, however, knew what had happened: she had been executed by the authorities, and her father-in-law was killed to cover up the murder.
Another exemplary shestidesyatniki figure was Vasil Stus. A great poet and one of the most active members of the movement, Stus was born in Donetsk (where the university now bears his name). Since his works could not be published in the USSR, a friend sent Stus’ manuscript to Belgium for publication. Stus was arrested.
After his release, Stus joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (a human rights monitoring organization), for which he was rearrested in 1980 and sentenced to ten years in a “strict-regime” labor camp, followed by five years of exile. During his second incarceration he was subjected to horrific conditions, including physical abuse and solitary confinement. Stus’ friends in the prison tried to communicate with him by tapping on the walls. At first, he answered, but as time passed, he stopped tapping back.
According to the printed museum guide, it is still unclear whether Stus was directly murdered at the prison, or simply put in conditions that led to his death.
Today, Stus’ son runs The Taras Shevchenko Museum in Kiev.
Other interesting items on display at the museum include a sculpture, “The Executioner,” by Boris Gavronian, which illustrates the common fate of writers in this era: a poet awaits a knife-bearing murderer. The museum also contains typewriters of famous shestidesyatniki, including that of Nadezhda Svetlichnaya, a Ukrainian lawyer and activist, whose dried flower arrangements – which she made in jail in the 1970s – are also on display. Visitors can also see many original photographs from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as declassified KGB files illustrating the varied fates of activists from the 1960s.
– Victoria Juharyan
Hundreds of kilometers from the sea, in the backwaters of Lipetsk Oblast, is the small village of Kon-Kolodez (population 1,910). At its center is the estate of Admiral Naum Senyavin, which looks not entirely unlike a seagoing vessel... but also is crowned with cupolas.
Explaining the cupolas is easy enough: on the second floor of the building is the Church of St. John (Ioann Bogoslavsky) and a church school.
But what is on the first floor is curiouser still: the Museum of the Sea.
Anyone who believes all the legends of Lipetsk Oblast would have to conclude that Peter the Great was in some way connected with every one of the region’s towns and villages. He discovered mineral springs in Lipetsk, and the city became a resort center for all of Russia; his carriage got stuck in the mud, and the village where this happened was bequeathed the name of Mud (Gryaz).
Even here, in Kon-Kolodez, there is a Petrine legend. Apparently the tsar’s horse broke its leg after stumbling on the edge of a well, and thus the village was given the name Kon-Kolodez (“Horse-Well”). The problem is that the first recorded mention of the village was in 1615 – 57 years before the future tsar was born.
But this does not mean there is no connection between Peter and Kon-Kolodez. In fact, it is due to the tsar’s indirect influence that this village contains the Museum of the Sea.
“Peter I had barely come to power,” says Museum Director Anna Tambovtseva, “and he decided to fight to gain an outlet to the Azov and Black Seas. Not far from Azov is Voronezh, where Peter decided to create the base for his fleet, and the tsar visited often, overseeing its work. And Admiral Senyavin accompanied him on his tours. Once, when the tsar had some difficulty crossing the small but rather swiftly-flowing Kon-Kolodez River (which empties into the Don, which then flows to the Azov Sea) in his carriage, he ordered the admiral to see that the road was better maintained and to build some bridges. The residents of the nearby village were supposed to help him in this. Later, after the Russian fleet enjoyed some success in one of its battles, it became easier for the admiral to carry out the tsar’s order, since Peter I gave him an estate in this region.”
After Senyavin’s death, the estate passed from one family member to another. In the Soviet era, when many estates were destroyed in an effort to erase traces of the tsarist regime, the Senyavin Estate was transformed into an agrarian technical school (and, in the town, the original stone church of St. John, which had been built by Konstantin Ton, was demolished). The estate continued to house the school until its buildings began to fall apart in the 1990s. And then, in 2001, it was given to the Russian Orthodox Church’s Lipetsk and Zadonsky Eparchy in the hope that the church could restore it. The roof was replaced with cupolas, and in the admiral’s former home the Church of St. John was reborn and a Sunday school was added.
“The first who promoted the creation of a museum of the sea in the village of Kon-Kolodez,” says Tambovtseva, “was Ivan Telkov, many years ago. He argued that Russia had many museums for military leaders, but not enough for naval leaders.”
Telkov did not live to see his idea come to fruition. And it never would have, were it not for the members of the Lipetsk Regional Division of the All-Russian Movement for Support of the Navy. They began bringing various items associated with the sea to the village’s cultural museum. Over time they accumulated so many pieces that the village administration decided to set aside a small space – on the first floor of the admiral’s former estate – to turn it all into a museum.
The most impressive exhibit is the flag that flew during the Cold War aboard the Pacific Ocean cruiser named for Admiral Senyavin.* It was donated by Leonid Gusev, chairman of the Lipetsk navy support group mentioned above.
Tambovtseva leads museum tours herself. And she readily accepts that the first thing most visitors to the museum see are the dirty flags hanging from the ceiling. Visitors often suggest that they be taken down, as they are an embarrassment, or that they be washed.
“Ships sailed the seas beneath these flags,” Tambovtseva says. “Sailors themselves delivered them to me. And we also have hanging here the symbols of the navy: the Russian and Andreyevsky banners. I’ve tried everything I know to clean them, but what powder can wash away such dirt, when these flags have flown on ships more than a year in any weather?”
Glass display cases protect the most ordinary of items: a device for recording humidity; a krenometer, which tracks whether a ship is listing to one side or the other. Someone else has donated a fog horn.
“Almost every sailor,” Tambovtseva says, “tries to take something to remember a ship by when he leaves it. And since I am good friends with the Lipetsk Division for Support of the Navy, people give me many things. That’s how the museum has filled up! For example, there is even a rivet from the steel of the legendary cruiser Aurora, taken during one of its restorations. On first glance, it may seem to be a simple piece of metal. But in reality it is a valuable item.”
The pennant collection occupies a special place in the museum. Each one has its own story. For example there is a pennant from the submarine Komsomolets, that sunk in the Sargasso Sea, and one from the submarine Kursk, that sunk to the bottom of the Barents Sea. How they ended up in the museum is easy to understand. But how they are connected with the village of Kon-Kolodez is harder to grasp.
There are actually rather few exhibits connected with Admiral Senyavin, in whose former home the museum is located: just a few archival documents, including one with the stamp of the family crest and his ornate signature. And his piano – an exhibit that visitors to the Museum of the Sea are not likely to expect.
“It came to us rather accidentally,” Tambovtseva says. “The builders were going in and out of the basement, hauling out trash. Among the many unwanted things they found a few interesting items, but they were all small. Then, when the builders were demolishing the furnace, they discovered something large, wrapped up in canvas, almost like cellophane, but sticky. It was hard to unpeel this covering, but when they did they discovered an 1846 piano from Leipzig. That’s what was written on the metallic plate. It is amazing that no one every noticed the instrument before!”
It probably survived because it was so well wrapped and because of the light-brown powder with an unpleasant smell that was used to filled its cavities.
The piano is connected with the admiral in that Ivan Senyavin, a descendant of the estate’s first owner, and his daughter Maria both played the instrument, and apparently rather well.
Thanks to Lipetsk sailors, the museum’s collection is constantly growing, demonstrating that one can curate a museum starting from almost nothing, even in the most unlikely of places.
– Yulia Skopich
In 1928, an international team of architects and engineers traveled south to Zaporizhia, Ukraine. Their purpose was to create a Socialist city, or Sotsgorod, a place of new ideological beginnings. Sotsgorod was to be a “new city” for a “new people.” Just as important, however, was its inclusion in the first Five-Year Plan aimed at rapid industrialization. Built in proximity to raw materials, Sotsgorod employed workers in the factories that powered the quickly growing Soviet economy.
The force that made it possible was Constructivism, a twentieth century philosophical and artistic movement that stressed that art should serve a constructive, social purpose. It went on to influence architectural giants such as Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, as well as graphic and industrial design more broadly. The head architect at Zaporizhia Sotsgorod, Victor Vesnin, was a pioneer in the Constructivist movement. He and his two brothers were among the most distinguished Soviet architects at the time; his most famous work is the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station (DniproHES), around which was built the neighboring Sotsgorod. Completed in 1932, the dam was the largest of its time and the pride of the USSR.
Lonely Planet describes Zaporizhia, a city of 750,000 on the River Dnieper, in the country’s southeastern corner, as a city that is “so, so Soviet.” Other common descriptions are: “provincial,” “industrial,” and “working-class.” Known for its thick Cossack history and sprawling metallurgical plants, this is generally not a city renowned for cultural happenings.
Against this backdrop in 2006, Yuri Barannik, a computer programmer turned musician-artist, founded the city’s first art gallery: Gallery Lenin, after the street where it was located. Actually, the gallery was really just a “constructive” extension of his apartment: he simply wanted to provide a place for his friends to display their work.
Like its owner, the space was offbeat. It consisted of several rooms, concrete slab walls, large windows, and bulky, Soviet-era radiators that blocked the incoming light. The windowsills were piled high with art books that visitors could take home or read on the spot, sinking slowly into slightly-stained, leather sofas. The collection was eclectic, to say the least: splatter-painted cutlery, unidentifiable wooden sculptures, a record-player.
After the 2014 Maidan uprising (when the gallery was a headquarters for local protesters and journalists), Barannik renamed his gallery from Gallery Lenin to Art Gallery Barannik.
“We are fighting to protect our city,” he said. “In order to make a better society, we need to reject the past.” Admittedly, a bold thing for a museum founder to say.
The gallery is a two-person shop. Art Director Natasha Lobach, a Zaporizhia native who sports tightly-wound blonde curls and a quick wit, answers emails while Barannik chats up visitors.
Since its inception in 2006, the space has held over 400 exhibitions bridging societal and artistic issues. “We don’t want Zaporizhia to be closed off from the world,” Lobach said. So there have been everything from experimental theater performances to lectures on domestic violence.
But the museum’s claim to fame is its exhibition on local Constructivist history. It began as an idea in 2010, when the gallery began hosting an annual Week of Constructivism, featuring exhibits, lectures, and workshops.
By way of example, Lobach leads a visitor on a tour of Sotsgorod, located less than half a mile from the gallery. The historical neighborhood consists of architecture that Barannik refers to as “pure Constructivism”: a boxy technical university; a palace of culture encased by white spiral beams; residential buildings sans kitchen (workers were meant to commune at the cafeteria); and a hospital made of scuffed stone and glass-paned connecting corridors, reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s Tsentrosoyuz Building built around the same time in Moscow, in 1933. Then, exiting the neighborhood, one is confronted by a bustling McDonalds – the pride of contemporary Zaporizhia, and its claim to post-Soviet modernism.
Neither Barannik nor Lobach hold degrees in architecture or history, so they work with other Ukrainian institutions of similar focus, namely the Urban Forms Center in Kharkiv. There, Evgenia Gubkina, co-founder and a leading figure in architectural heritage of Ukraine, has collaborated with the gallery to organize conferences on restoration, inviting specialists from around the world to visit a city few outside Ukraine know.
In 2016, the gallery partnered with USAID to host “Historical Locations,” a festival highlighting Zaporizhia’s Constructivist history. The “Circle House,” a residential building that forms a massive letter “C” (S, in Russian), allegedly to stand for Stalin, was transformed into the festival’s main stage. Open-air exhibits in the central green space bewildered locals. Few knew that their home, built in the early 1930s, just before Stalin quashed the Constructivist movement, was an exemplar of architectural modernism.
All of this came to a culmination in the Spring of 2017, when Barannik and Lobach opened the Museum of Constructivism. They had spent a decade gathering physical and intellectual exhibits, largely without cost, and today it is Ukraine’s only Constructivist museum. As such, it courts controversy. After all, Constructivism is a Soviet legacy, and the very sort of thing a sizable portion of the Ukrainian population are actively seeking to eradicate.
Gubkina, in an article for the Calvert Journal, wrote that the architectural style is in “danger from Ukrainian nationalism, as represented by the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance (UNIR). UNIR does not destroy material heritage itself, but effectively stigmatizes the entire heritage of the USSR without discrimination.”
Thus, Constructivism is not just about modernism and experimental architecture. In Ukraine, it is an emblem of Soviet ideology, history, and ultimately, oppression.
The result is that the architectural style is often deprecated in Ukraine. The most salient example took place in Kharkiv this past year, when the city mayor organized a competition to replace Derzhprom, a Constructivist building complex on the city’s Freedom Square that is an outstanding example of the form. Activists protested to save the architectural marvel – and for good reason. Derzhprom is technically under the protection of the Ukrainian government.
Constructivist architecture in Zaporizhia, however, remains unprotected. The Sotsgorod and DniproHES, one of the most defining architectural and historical objects of the last century, are excluded from Ukraine’s list of protected sites. This makes them vulnerable to a number of external threats, from the company that owns it, Yкргідроенерго, to the Ukrainian government.
In reality, the Constructivist Museum is just a single room in the back of Art Gallery Barannik – small and charming, it reflects the enthusiasm and care of its owners. Painted half yellow, half red, it stands out from the surrounding concrete slab. Black and white photographs of 1930s Zaporizhia hang on the walls and esoteric books like “Space Structures of the USSR” occupy horizontal surfaces.
For funding, the museum/gallery relies exclusively on sponsorship. The art space is an NGO; it does not commission artists to exhibit their work. “All we pay is the electricity bill,” Lobach joked.
One unexpected source of support, however, has been the German Consulate. Two years ago Lobach took a German consular officer on a tour of Sotsgorod. His daughter is an architect and so he took a liking to the project, and this fall the gallery/museum hosted German architectural specialists for a discussion of the restoration and preservation of the Sotsgorod.
As that partnership demonstrates, Art Gallery Barannik, like many vibrant, young museums, is more than just four walls to display static works of art. It is a beating heart of its city’s artistic community.
Friends of the gallery, from historians and photographers to bungee jump instructors, regularly convene and talk art at Barannik’s place – an art gallery slash museum by day, a living quarters by night. Artists like a young woman named Ksenia, who had recently joined an experimental theater group. “We want Zaporizhia’s residents to be proud of their city,” she said. “To know they belong to something big.”
* A secondary school (often private) that generally prepares its students for higher education.
* In service from 1954-1989, it is not certain which Admiral Senyavin the cruiser was named for, see box, opposite page.
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