Translated material
Here's to our happy childhood...
Natalia Shkurenok
Museum-apartment of Kirov. St. Petersburg
This exhibition about the 20-30s (authors: museum director Tatyana Sukharnikova and artist Maria Staborovskaya) is built on contrasts: tenderness and nostalgia from meeting old things and shock from documents, most of which are being exhibited for the first time.
Cheerful photographs: identically dressed boys are walking with flags in their hands, and next to it is an extract from a report on the growth of child crime in Leningrad for the years 1928-1935: the number of crimes committed by minors has increased two and a half times. Krupskaya’s touching face is adjacent to the “execution” resolution of the Central Executive Committee of the Council of People’s Commissars of 1935: “Minors, starting from the age of 12, convicted of committing thefts, causing violence, bodily harm, mutilation... shall be brought to criminal court with the application of all criminal penalties ".
In a cozy corner called “Girl’s Room,” the story of a real girl’s family is presented (Maria Staborovskaya allowed the use of family documents in the exhibition: her grandfather was arrested, and her mother then lived her whole life with the stigma of being the daughter of an enemy of the people), and in the center of the hall is a portrait of Lenin, above which poster: “All children are the property of the state.”
And yet the exhibition turned out to be not at all aggressive. Maybe this impression is caused by genuine old things that can be touched (new caretakers were specially recruited who do not fall into hysterics when they watch visitors take the exhibits in their hands), things from another world, when everything was fine.
Visitors don’t just walk through the halls and watch, they actively experience the events of history. You can “enroll” in a scout troop if you have the patience to fill out a huge application form. And then read documents about how former scouts, “passed through the Union filter,” were used to create pioneer detachments (the scouting movement was later destroyed). You can put on plywood wings, play with a wooden gun and at the same time engage in rhythmic declamation: “Who catches bourgeois women in nets? Well, of course, Clara Zetkin!” In the corridor there is a VCR, where they play old, pre-war films, and from the loudspeakers comes: “Hello, dear potato-toshka-toshka...”