The Historical Museum will open the exhibition "People as people. They love money"

The exhibition is dedicated to the 135th anniversary of Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov and the 60th anniversary of the publication of the first part of the novel "The Master and Margarita".

The novel "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov is an outstanding work of Russian and world literature. The novel touches on the eternal themes of love and loyalty, betrayal and cowardice, money and greed. Each new generation of readers finds important truths in it that are in tune with their era. Nowadays, "The Master and Margarita" is one of the most popular and quoted works of Russian literature of the 20th century.

The theme of money runs through the book like a red thread. It would not be an exaggeration to say that money is the heroes of the novel "The Master and Margarita". In the work we find philosophical discussions about money, and plots related to moral categories, where money is a test of honesty and selflessness for many characters.

"For the Historical Museum, the exhibition "People as people. They love money" is an opportunity to show visitors a very small part of the country's largest numismatic collection, which has over 1.7 million monuments. This project demonstrates in the best possible way that money is not only an object of economic interest, but also a mirror of the mores of the era and time. No matter how the appearance of banknotes has changed, no matter how different the state systems are, money has been and remains a means of communication within society," says Alexey Levykin, General Director of the Historical Museum.

The exhibition "People as people. They love money" will introduce visitors to the monuments of monetary circulation of two eras — ancient Judea in the 30s of the first century A.D. and Soviet Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s. For the first time, coins and banknotes used by the heroes of the legendary novel will be seen on it. The first section will cover the topic of monetary circulation in Judea, a province of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the 1st millennium AD. Local (provincial) coins and state Roman coins will be shown here, and the topic of Roman taxation of the inhabitants of Judea will be touched upon. Visitors will see coins that could be used by the characters of the novel Pontius Pilate, Mark the Pied Piper, Levi Matvey. The central part of the first hall of the exhibition space will be a showcase with the "thirty pieces of silver" – ancient Greek silver tetradrachms of the Phoenician city of Tyre. They are the ones traditionally associated with the coins that Judas received for his betrayal. The halls dedicated to the Soviet era will tell about important phenomena of the Soviet economic policy of the 1920s and 1930s: the first Soviet monetary reform of 1922-1924 and the introduction of gold coins, the gold and foreign exchange policy of the Soviet state and the Torgsin store.

A separate section of the exhibition will be devoted to the Soviet gold coins, the plots with their magical transformations occupy an important place in the novel. The exhibition will feature all samples of these banknotes, which were issued between 1922 and 1937, and the exhibition will also show how their design has changed. Visitors will be able to find out which gold coins fell from the ceiling of the Variety Theater during a black magic session.

An important part of the exhibition will be the section dedicated to the activities of the Torgsin store, where one of the most striking scenes of the novel involving Koroviev and the cat Behemoth took place. It will showcase Torgsin's commodity orders, which are currently among the rarest state-owned means of payment of the Soviet era.

In addition to coins and banknotes, each section of the exhibition will feature exhibits that will help convey the atmosphere of the novel and transport visitors to ancient Jerusalem and Soviet Moscow of the Mikhail Bulgakov era. An important semantic point of the exhibition will be the "Writer's Room", where M. A. Bulgakov's personal belongings and the magazine "Moscow" from 1966, in which the first part of the great novel was published, will be shown.