More respect to the traditions of culture" or "chaos and mismanagement": unrealized plans of ethnography museums merger in Petrograd (1917-1920)

The article, on the basis of little-known archival materials from the archives of St. Petersburg (Central State Archive of Literature and Arts of St. Petersburg and St. Petersburg Branch of Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences) that previously did not attract the attention of researchers, analyzes the unrealized plans of transformation of ethnography museums of Petrograd (Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography and the Ethnographic Department of the Russian Museum). The first draft of the transformations is connected with the activities of the conference on problems of museology and monuments protection which assembled in the spring and summer of 1917 at the Institute of Art History. This project was announced at one of the meetings of the conference by Nikolay Mogylyansky. Alexander Miller took an active participation in the meeting. There was no unequivocal and unanimous response regarding the advisability of merging ethnography museums. But, probably, the main position was the position of careful watching. In materials prepared for the transfer to governmental authorities, the security position of preserving the status quo prevailed. The second project is connected with the work of the Commission on the Unification of Museums that operated at the Academy of Sciences in the summer of 1920. The issues of the reformation of ethnography museums were raised in the report of Lev Sternberg. Sergey Zhebelev, Alexander Miller, Sergey Oldenburg, Georgy Yatmanov and others took an active part in the discussion. Concrete plans, supported by the new government, were not implemented. The representatives of the old intelligentsia did not hurry to put the revolutionary ideas into practice. But some of the ideas expressed in this Commission are likely to have been associated with the ideas of the prominent orientalist and Director of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography Vasily Radlov, expressed back in 1917. The first All-Russian conference on museum problems (February 1919, Petrograd), which proclaimed a large-scale program of unification and centralization of the collections of the museums, may be regarded as a mediator between these initiatives. Authors of some reports claimed that the collections of all Russian museums should be seen as part of a general National Museum Fund. On the one hand, these discussions can be interesting as a reflection of ethnographic concepts and approaches of that era, and, on the other hand, as an evidence of certain continuity of museological ideas existed before and after the Revolution. Understanding of all museum collections in Russia as a single fund, which can be tailored based on scientific principles, was typical for the revolutionary government after 1917. But it cannot be entirely considered as the invention of this new government and its supporters. A significant role in shaping these ideas belonged to representatives of the old intelligentsia who voiced similar ideas before the October Revolution.

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