An unfinished story

The Hermitage opened an exhibition about the Russian Imperial Guard in Paris

“In the service of kings. The Russian Imperial Guard from Peter the Great to the October Revolution of 1917" - as ontological as it is nostalgic, the Hermitage exhibition opened at the Army Museum in Paris. From the idea to its implementation exactly ten years: in 2000, at the invitation of Mikhail Piotrovsky, descendants of officers of the Preobrazhensky, Izmailovsky, Semenovsky and other famous regiments came to the exhibition dedicated to the 300th anniversary of the Guard. Then the idea of ​​an exhibition first arose: about the Russian military elite, its exploits, glory and difficult relationships with the authorities and, finally, about the tragic outcome: the death of the empire and its army in 1917. Over the course of ten years, an independent department appeared in the Hermitage - the Museum of the Guard, located in the General Staff Building. The Russian Revolution, despite its merciless cruelty, turned out to be more merciful to material memory than the French: it spared museum exhibits. Those who came to the exhibition were able to verify this. More than 240 exhibits from the collection of the once Imperial, and now State Hermitage (including the Poltava uniform of Peter the Great, which has never left St. Petersburg, the bullet-riddled overcoat of Alexander the Second, in which the emperor survived the assassination attempt on Palace Square, “The Battle of Borodino” by Hesse ) formed the basis of the exhibition. And the exhibition was complemented by items from the Paris Cossack Museum, created by officers of the Life Guards Cossack Regiment back in Catherine’s times, evacuated to the Don during the revolution and then taken by officers of the Volunteer Army first to Serbia and then to France. Also, exhibits from the Royal Army Museum in Brussels came to the exhibition in Paris: those that were given here for temporary storage from the Cossack Museum when the socialists came to power in France in the 30s. In particular, a collection of regimental pipes was brought from Brussels. The exhibition is one of the key events of the Year of France in Russia and Russia in France.

The banner of the Life Guards Preobrazhensky Regiment, awarded to the Preobrazhensky Regiment in 1814, when Russian troops entered Paris, caused great delight among both journalists and representatives of the Russian and French diplomatic corps who came to the opening. (By 1814, the Imperial Guard, having increased its numbers many times over, formed a full-fledged corps, in which all branches of the army were represented.) Almost two hundred years later, the banner returned to the capital of France to be located in the window of the Army Museum, a stone's throw from Napoleon's tomb. By the way, as the director of the Army Museum, General Robert Bresse, noted, in two years Russia and France will celebrate the bicentenary of the War of 1812, and this is a good reason to continue cooperation in the museum field. “In general,” the general who commanded the French NATO contingent in Yugoslavia diplomatically summed up, “a united Europe cannot be built without cultural contacts.” The war ended, and the Russian army, which had covered itself with unfading glory, and its guards elite, could not and did not want to stay out of politics. The creators of the exhibition suggest thinking about the relationship between the government and the army: when and why does a mental, and then a real, split arise? One of the points of emotional attraction is the showcase dedicated to the Decembrist uprising. In it is the uniform of Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, who commanded the artillery that suppressed the rebels, and the uniform of an officer of the rebel Life Grenadier. Between them is a sword.

“We sought not only to show the chronology of events in the history of the Russian Guard, especially since it is impossible to grasp the immensity. Our task is to create an image that affects not only the mind, but also the feelings. Therefore, the exhibition has, so to speak, a personal touch, be it the time of the founder of the guard, Peter the Great, or the end of the era - the reign of Nicholas II. Our subjects are a series of alternating pictures that reveal various culminating moments in the life of the Russian state through the prism of what was happening in the army,” says Sergei Plotnikov, curator of the exhibition, head of the military heraldry sector of the Arsenal department. The task as a whole was achieved: there is a colorful story about the Battle of Narva and Poltava, there is also a detailed story about the era of palace coups, when the guard turned into an instrument of the internal struggle for power. Of course, the magnificent era of Catherine the Second is presented in all its glory; there is also a hint of the tragedy of the end of the state and its army - with the display of Tsarevich Alexei’s 1914 uniform and officer’s overcoat, the narrative ends, although there are still three years before the end of the history of the guard. Why? “The guards never returned from the fields of the First World War,” says Plotnikov. - It changed its composition many times, new, random people came to the regiments who had not absorbed the generational guards tradition. And the death of the Russian guard, in fact, predetermined the death of the empire. That’s why our exhibition does not go chronologically up to 1917.” This is perhaps the only figure of silence at the exhibition: there is no story about the tragedy of the army, split by revolutionary times. “The shoulder straps had not yet been torn off and the regiments had not been shot,” but in February 1917, the reserve battalion of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, located in Petrograd, was the first to side with the revolution. (It was disbanded in December of the revolutionary year, followed by other regiments.) The first regiment of the empire was the first to side with the forces that destroyed the empire - it is difficult to come up with a more sinister and more significant symbol of the times. Then - the Civil War, where there were almost equal numbers of tsarist officers in both the White movement and the Red Army. But the incompleteness of the story about the Guards, invented and shown by the Hermitage, perhaps has its own reason: having sensed the information gap, you perceive even more acutely the significance of the presence in the display cases next to the Hermitage items of Guards relics rescued in the chaos of the revolution, now occupying their historical place in the exhibition in direct and figuratively place. The highest gifts to the best regiments of the empire, personal belongings of officers, awards, carefully preserved by the heirs, took their places in display cases next to the Hermitage exhibits. The descendants of the guardsmen who came to the opening of the exhibition - the Obolenskys, Trubetskoys, Bibikovs - spoke with pride about this... The time torn apart by the Soviet regime cannot be returned, but the memory, including that materialized in the exhibits, fortunately, is returning.

Julia KANTOR, Paris - St. Petersburg