| The Andrei Rublev Museum was unlucky again. The attempts repeatedly made in Soviet times to close it (“for excessive religiosity”) unexpectedly intensified in our officially Orthodox times. Efforts to “optimize federal budget expenditures” led to the emergence of a blacklist of museums within the commission created for this useful mission. His other figures did not attract much public attention, since the ethnographic museum in Torzhok (which is being liquidated) is not known to the public, and the fate of the museum in Gorki Leninskiye, although difficult, is honorable, and most importantly, logical. It will become a branch of the Museum of Contemporary History of Russia. The latter, however, is barely staying afloat and has difficulty managing itself - let alone the newly acquired branch. But this is idle reasoning given the current state of Russian museums in general, and Moscow museums in particular.
Divided into state and municipal, Moscow museums eke out a miserable existence for the most part, except that the municipal squalor is lined with marble, and the plaster is crumbling from the state walls. City museums, stuffed to the brim with items of dubious (far from museum quality) quality, are fattening up in cultural monuments, finished like God never finished a turtle. While unique masterpieces in state museums are deprived of even decent storage conditions. Absurd feudal pride and absurd adherence to principles (I don’t want to think that it’s just bad taste) do not allow the Moscow authorities to help the pride of national culture with the means at their disposal, but force, in defiance of who knows who, to build children’s fountains at the Kremlin wall and the Shilov Museum at the entrance to the Kremlin. It’s as if the public, ours and those visiting, differentiates museums by their affiliation. Through the combined efforts of the rich municipality and the poor federals, Moscow museums (without distinction of level of subordination) are slowly and surely plunging into the abyss of hopeless provincialism, without a fight yielding to St. Petersburg the laurels of leaders - proactive, advanced, active, original. The main thing is interesting.
The Rublev Museum is small, located in an inconvenient place, not everyone can get there. And quiet, not noticed in advertising exploits. The Rublev Museum is the only cultural institution in the capital, which, after all the “expulsions from the temple,” is located in an ancient monastery. Thus, clearly demonstrating the centuries-old unity of Russian Orthodox culture. The removal of the museum from the monastery seems to be the only reason for the proposed dissolution of the museum and the transfer of its ten thousand fund to the Tretyakov Gallery, because no other savings from the expensive move are visible. Moreover, recently, in the Rublev Museum, an excellent storage facility was built with state money, by the way, and in the Tretyakov Gallery there will be nowhere to even put it all. Not to mention the fact that the modest exhibition of the Rublev Museum is distinguished by laconic nobility, even sophistication, and in the Tretyakov Gallery the icons are pushed into the distant depths of the building on Lavrushinsky, and even shoved into utter display cabinets.
The assumption about the involvement of the church in the troubles of the Rublev Museum seems strange, so good is the picture of their cooperation. The museum participates in church exhibitions; its employees help catalog the collection of the church-archaeological office of the Moscow Theological Academy, work on editions of the Orthodox Encyclopedia; the director of the museum, a well-known specialist in ancient Russian art, Gennady Popov is even on the council of the Orthodox Encyclopedia, which is headed by the patriarch. Half a million museum visitors come into the church along the way, supporting the tiny parish financially. There is not enough space for everyone, but the possibilities for development (both the parish and the museum) are great: the museum has been unsuccessfully fighting for the Khryashchev estate for years, where it could show its unique collections of icons from the pre-Petrine era, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, monumental painting (originals and copies).
There is a well-known world experience of the coexistence of a museum and a church (even a monastery) on the same territory. The most striking example is the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection in Barcelona. There the museum (completely secular in content) functions only until three o'clock in the afternoon, and the rest of the time the monastery lives its own life. The Vatican Museums are open seven days a week. Numerous Italian monasteries and churches are not burdened by museums. It seemed that in Russia, too, the church began to cooperate with museums, gradually abandoning the general and senseless restitution of its immense pre-revolutionary goods.
Director Gennady Popov is trying to understand who and when compiled the blacklist of museums, why budget optimization should be reduced to reducing the already small cultural space - Moscow and Russia - and why all changes in the country should be paid for with cultural heritage. And what are they going to put into the incubator of the national idea, destroying and dissipating the already poorly preserved past? Faina BALAKHOVSKAYA
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