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- Cultural priceless items: what rarities our country has lost and gained because of the war
Cultural priceless items: what rarities our country has lost and gained because of the war
More than 1 million works of art and historical values — the Soviet Union lost so many museum items during the Great Patriotic War. Despite the large-scale evacuation of the masterpieces of the Hermitage, the Tretyakov Gallery and other treasures of the capital, undertaken in the first months after the attack of Nazi Germany, the damage from the bombing and German looting of the captured cities was enormous. It was only partially compensated by captured works of art, but many of the lost items were priceless. Izvestia recalls the impact of the Second World War on the national cultural heritage.
Looted palaces
As you know, the German attack on the USSR in June 1941 was sudden, the authorities did not prepare for it. For the first six months, the Fascist troops advanced rapidly, capturing one city after another. Therefore, the evacuation of valuables from the country's largest museums had to be organized urgently, often without the necessary packaging materials, transport, and so on. It is known, for example, that at first only two carriages were allocated for the treasures of the Historical Museum. Often, the destinations (and these are the Urals, the Volga region, Siberia, and even Kazakhstan) were completely unprepared to accommodate a huge number of items. Nevertheless, thanks to the truly heroic efforts of the museum staff, millions of exhibits were saved.
Unfortunately, not all of them. Some could not be transported in principle, some died due to the bombing, some simply did not have time to pick up, and it was captured by the advancing Germans. A total of 173 museums lost their objects, including the Tretyakov Gallery, the Hermitage, Pushkin and others. And how many ancient churches with all their utensils, rare books and manuscripts burned down is beyond counting. Mikhail Shvydkoi, as the head of the Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography, cited the following data: the 15 richest museums lost 269,515 objects. In total, museums, libraries and archives in Russia characterize the losses with an even more frightening figure: 1,177,291.
Palaces and manors of the Leningrad region — Tsarskoye Selo, Peterhof, Gatchina, Pavlovsk - suffered the heaviest losses. It is believed that they have become impoverished by about two thirds of the exhibits. In particular, the most famous landmark of Peterhof, the fountain sculpture "Samson tearing the lion's mouth", was taken away by the Germans, and today its fate is unknown. A replica made after the war is on display in the park. Another famous loss is the Amber Room from Tsarskoye Selo, only a few items of which were found decades later.
Painting also suffered. Among the paintings that did not survive the Great Patriotic War are the works of Shishkin, Vereshchagin and many other artists. However, the most valuable of the main metropolitan museums still managed to be saved. The regional galleries suffered much more. That's just one story. The Kramskoy Voronezh Museum housed over 16,000 exhibits before the war. Until 1942, about 15 thousand were evacuated, but the rest remained, and when the city was occupied by the Germans, it disappeared. Most likely, they died from the explosion of bombs and fire, although it is possible that they could have been partially abducted by invaders.
The Lost Malevich
The museum staff recently restored the history of one of these losses, presenting the results at a scientific conference. We are talking about the supremacist painting by Kazimir Malevich, painted in 1915 and presented at the exhibition "0.10" — the one where the "Black Square" was first shown. There is a famous photograph of the Moscow exposition: the "Black Square" hangs in the corner above, and around it there are a number of other works demonstrating Malevich's latest stylistic experiments. Researchers of the Russian avant-garde have long analyzed this picture in detail, tracing the history of most of the canvases. But there were still "white spots". And recently, experts from Voronezh spotted one of the unidentified paintings adjacent to the "Black Square" in a pre-war photograph taken at the Kramskoy Museum.
Obviously, this was one of those works that the avant-gardists themselves sent to the regions in the early 1920s in order to help local artists and viewers get acquainted with the advanced metropolitan trends. If this masterpiece had been preserved to this day, its cost would have amounted to tens of millions of dollars. For comparison, Malevich's "Suprematist Composition" from 1916, which is less valuable than the piece created immediately after the "Black Square" and exhibited with it, sold for $85 million in 2018.
With the same avant-garde, as well as with Russian painting of the 19th century, the situation is aggravated by the fact that the Germans did not perceive all this as an artistic value. And if, for example, they treated the treasures of the Louvre in occupied France with care and even allowed the director of the Paris museum to quietly take out the most valuable, then on Soviet territory they often behaved completely barbarously, giving churches, galleries, libraries to soldiers to plunder, or even simply destroying and certainly not caring about safety.
Save Rafael
The Soviet troops acted in a completely different way at the end of the war, liberating Europe from the power of the fascists. Of course, anything could have happened during the fighting, but it is safe to say that many cultural treasures exported to the USSR in 1945 were simply saved, because otherwise they would have died during bombing, fires and simply the lack of normal storage conditions in dilapidated German cities.
The most striking example, of course, is the treasures from the Dresden Art Gallery, led by Raphael's Sistine Madonna, one of the greatest works of the Renaissance. The canvases were transferred to the Pushkin Museum, where they were not only carefully preserved, but also restored. Ten years later, in 1955, by order of Nikita Khrushchev, they were returned to the GDR. Three years later, the same fate befell a number of other valuables saved by the Soviet troops, in particular, the famous Pergamon altar, an antique marble high relief.
In total, about 2.5 million museum items were exported from Germany to the USSR. Returned in different years — 1.5 million. The remaining amount is less than was lost due to the fault of Nazi Germany. Irina Antonova, the former director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, said: "This is compensation. One thousandth of the compensation." But still, among these values there are things that are really first-class, extremely important for domestic gatherings. For example, about twenty paintings by Cranach ("Mr. Burgomaster", "The Fall", "The Adoration of the Magi") that ended up in Pushkin, impressionist masterpieces from the collection of Otto Krebs, stored in the Hermitage, two first-printed Gutenberg Bibles in the Russian State Library.…
You can't give it away.
Although in the 1990s and 2000s, this was almost given away. So, in 1994, Boris Yeltsin promised to return the cultural values of Germany, but the State Duma and the Federation Council prevented him from realizing his plans. And in 1998, the law "On Cultural property displaced to the USSR as a result of World War II and located on the territory of the Russian Federation" was adopted. It stipulates that such things that remained in Russia were and remain its national heritage. Yeltsin refused to sign the document, and was ordered to do so by the Constitutional Court.
Under one "sauce" or another, the issue of restitution arose later. In particular, the so—called Bremen (Baldinsky) collection, which was kept in the Hermitage, was repeatedly threatened - two paintings and 362 drawings (including works by Rembrandt, Durer, Rubens, Manet, Degas, Van Gogh) from the Kunsthalle Museum in Bremen. In 2003, the Ministry of Culture tried to return it to its former owners, but then the State Duma Committee on Culture and the prosecutor's office defended it. In 2005, the Agency for Culture and Cinematography lobbied for the idea, but the Ministry of Culture was headed by another minister, Alexander Sokolov, who, joining forces with Irina Antonova, put an end to all such conversations, speaking out strongly against any attempts to transfer Russian museum values to Germany.
There were also legal grounds for this. Even Berlin itself recognized that the irreversibility of the property decisions made by the Soviet troops in 1945-1948 was a condition of the USSR's consent to the unification of Germany and the GDR. But it is clear that attempts to return displaced works of art, successful or not— have always (since the Khrushchev era) been used as a tool of interstate relations. In particular, many officials saw restitution as a way to get closer to Germany. It was all the more difficult for museum workers and cultural figures to keep politicians from taking irreversible steps. Today it is doubly obvious who was right then.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
