Prehistoric Museum

In the very center of Moscow, in house number one on Red Square, there is a unique working life-size model of the museum. You can take your children there to show them what museums were like at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

Large beautiful halls. Strict old caretakers. Glazed showcases. A bunch of incomprehensible rubbish, the logic of its arrangement should probably become clear when reading the inscriptions. It is, however, completely impossible to read them, because they have not been subjected to either literary or scientific editing for at least thirty years.

No, really, the State Historical Museum is so bad that it’s even hard to believe. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this were the mid-90s and the outskirts of the country - it’s clear that there’s no money, there’s no people and there’s nothing. But we just had a well-fed 2000s, and this is the main square of the country - more important than Dvortsovaya with its Hermitage. I can still understand why no one has redone all the explanatory inscriptions so that they are interesting to read - why, if everyone goes to the museum anyway - but at least it was possible to translate them into English in the last ten years?

However, even if a person understands Russian, this will not help him much. In order to get some benefit from a historical museum, you need to know in advance everything about the exhibits on display there, otherwise there is no point in coming there. This is especially striking in the first halls dedicated to ancient man. There are explanatory pictures on the walls, according to which the Neanderthal man turns out to be the direct ancestor of the Cro-Magnon man - you need to be able to filter this out. There are display cases with the results of excavations at specific sites - there is not a word in the explanatory texts about dating, so if you do not know what kind of site it is, looking at the display case is pointless. In those display cases where there is still a dating, two systems of notations alternate without any clear logic: they can write “250 thousand years ago”, or maybe just “Paleolithic” - in order to compare these concepts, an illiterate visitor should find and read the third inscription.

Well, okay, there may not be anthropologists on the staff of the historical museum; there is no one to restore order. But in the following halls, exactly the same picture is observed: the meaning of the exhibit of the historical museum is revealed only to the visitor who already knows history well - all explanatory inscriptions are designed specifically for specialists, and not for amateurs. An ordinary person, when he sees an object, wants to know what it is, where it was made, by whom and when. Of the last three points, one or two are necessarily missing. Here is a helmet, it was made by the Sarmatians. If you don’t know who the Sarmatians were, where and when they lived, you are a fool, and there is no point in you meddling in our wonderful museum. Or at least go to those halls that the basic school curriculum will help you study.

Where you can rely on the school curriculum, it is easier to navigate - especially for people who graduated from school in the Soviet Union, because the style of texts about autocracy is exactly the same. In these halls everything is already clear, but absolutely nothing new. Well, yes, costumes, portraits, furniture, meager indications of time and class. In all the explanatory texts of the museum there is not a single living paragraph - one from which one could suspect that the author is interested in what he is writing about. For example, there is a royal throne, the time of manufacture is indicated. It looks deplorable: the velvet has worn through to the base, the whole seat has some terrible stains. It is clear that there is a whole story hidden here - some soldiers and sailors must have broken in, dragged the throne into a tavern, performed indecent acts on it, and only a few years later the museum managed to recapture it. And where is this story? And if you don’t want to describe it, then why can’t the throne be restored? What should a visitor think - that the kings themselves brought their furniture to such a piggy state? Again - if so, why? Or in another room - a beautiful dried head. It is said about her “mummy”. That's all. What mummy, why, why only one head? No answer.

The entire modernization includes several monitors with films. I, a wild creature, tried to touch them in order to go to the menu and start the movie from the beginning, but it turned out that nothing like that was provided, look what they give. But, however, there is good news: one of the halls is closed. The caretakers cannot say anything intelligible about this (someone closed it for some reason for a while, they say, and is doing something there) - but I still hope that, perhaps, the creation of such a hall will begin from this hall a historical museum, for which Muscovites and especially guests of our city would not be ashamed. For now, it’s a shame: if the exhibition of the country’s main historical museum is so boring, then there is a strong feeling that in the history of Russia itself there has never been anything worthy of attention.

Anastasia Kazantseva