Museum for ‘Worker and Collective Farm Girl’

A museum-exhibition complex may open under Moscow’s “Worker and Collective Farm Girl” statue in September.

The opening date is planned to coincide with the annual City Day celebration, which this year is on September 4-5.

The iconic sculpture was created by Soviet sculptor Vera Mukhina and architect Boris Iofan over the years 1935-37. In October 2003, restoration work on the aged statue began; it was dismantled and taken down. The statue reappeared on a new, higher platform last autumn. An exhibition hall with a capacity of up to 5,000 visitors is to open in the pavilion underneath the statue.

Devil in the details

In a bizarre court case that could have easily made the pages of Mikhail Bulgakov's best known novel, "The Master and Margarita", a privately operated Moscow museum dedicated to the writer is facing the confiscation of its exhibits and possible disruption of its operations.
Moscow's arbitration court recently ruled that Alexander Morozov, who lives in the same Garden Ring building that houses the ground-floor Bulgakov House Cultural Centre, is the rightful owner of 6 million roubles' worth of the museum's exhibits. Morozov has said the items were stolen from him. The museum plans to appeal the ruling.
Nikolai Golubev, the museum's director, shrugged off the accusations as absurd and unsubstantiated. "The whole thing was so bizarre that we weren't even worried at the beginning," he said. "[Morozov] just came to the museum, took pictures of the exhibits and claimed that they belonged to him. From the viewpoint of common sense, this is nonsense and he is obviously lying."
The museum building, located at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya Ulitsa, was where Bulgakov himself lived for several years after moving to Moscow in the early 1920s. In "The Master and Margarita," he described the No. 50 apartment where he stayed as the "Nekhoroshaya kvartira" or "Bad Apartment." Bul­gakov died in 1940, and only 25 years later, when Soviet society's ideological restrictions were loosened, was the novel first published in Russia. It quickly earned a cult status, which later turned into massive popularity all around the world.
By the late 1980s, the "Bad Apart­ment" and the building itself had become the focus of pilgrimages by Bulgakov's fans. In the early 1990s, the building, which used to host a design bureau, stood half abandoned. Besides hanging around the building's hallways, some Bulgakov fans actually moved into the apartment, which turned into a kind of a squat. In the meantime, ownership of the building, which had both residential and commercial spaces, changed hands several times. Dozens of squatters lived in apartment No. 50 and apartment No. 6 until the authorities evicted them in the mid-1990s, after one of the apartments was reportedly damaged by fire.
In 2000, some of the building's residents, including Morozov, formed The Foundation for the Preservation of the Bulgakov House. In 2004, a group of Bulgakov-loving entrepreneurs opened the Bulgakov House Cultural Centre on the ground floor of the building at 10 Bolshaya Sadovaya Ulitsa. While it doesn't have official status as a museum, it is open free to the public and provides guided tours. Three years later, the state Bulgakov Museum was opened in the "Bad Apartment." It has sometimes been confused with Bulgakov House.
Komsomolskaya Pravda daily reported Morozov as saying in March that The Foun­dation for the Pre­servation of the Bulgakov House was the original owner of the museum's antique collection. The paper reported him as saying that the foundation once ran a children's theatre. His wife, a former actress, would sing for the children and that their parents were so happy with the performances that they donated the antiques en masse to the foundation, from where they were later stolen.
Golubev said he was certain that the ruling was a court mistake. "We are preparing for an appeal," he said. "In the meantime, the museum is operating as usual. Moreover, we are collecting new exhibits and are launching a theatre stage downstairs in the same building."
But if the appeal is rejected, the museum could face financial troubles. The director said that Morozov's motivation was money.
"He put his alleged losses at $200,000, but that figure is absolutely random," Golubev said. "He doesn't want these exhibits, he wants cash. What would come out of that? Our bank accounts would be frozen and we wouldn't be able to properly operate. It's too bad that it is all happening at a time of an economic downturn and no one has any extra cash."
"We would, in fact, like to help the cultural centre, but we don't have that authority - it's not a government museum," Komsomolskaya Pravda reported Romuald Krylov-Iodko, deputy head of the city's cultural de­part­ment, as saying. "In any case, it's very sad for the cultural centre. In many ways they are a lot more active than our state mu­seum, which recently opened in the ‘Bad Apartment' at No. 50 of the same building. It's currently at the stage of being set up, so it's all rather difficult. If we receive all those people who currently visit the cultural centre, I'm afraid we won't cope. For starters, Golubev has well developed programmes and excursions. And secondly, they have more space - we are terribly cramped."
Both Morozov and The Foundation for the Preservation of the Bulgakov House were not available for comment. The appeal is scheduled for April 26 in the Moscow arbitration court.

Book Lovers’ Moscow

For many centuries, Moscow has been a city of books: great writers lived here and great libraries and Universities were founded here. Moscow's first printed book was produced on Nikolskaya Ulitsa in the sixteenth century. The first Higher Education Academy was set up nearby a century later and numbered the renaissance man, Mikhail Lomonosov, among its students. Lomonosov in turn founded the Moscow State University in 1755. The Empress Elizabeth issued the decree ordering its creation on January 25th which has been celebrated ever since as "Students Day" or "Tatiana Day". In the spirit of academic celebration, this walk visits museums and book shops, printing houses and writer's rooms. You can also have lunch with the students in the University canteen or downstairs in one of Moscow's oldest bookstores.
The "Book Museum" inside the Biblioteka Imeni Lenina is a great place to start. The Russian State Library began in the nearby Pashkov House in 1862. The present Soviet-era building is suitably grand and serious with storage space for 36 million books. Go through the imposing collonade, away from the main road and the monumental statue of Dostoevsky reading, through a wooden door with a carved surround, and up to the fourth floor. The exhibits focus on the book-as-artefact and include original copies of "The Apostle", that first book printed in Moscow. There are also beautiful engravings, huge silver-bound tomes and tiny thumbnail-sized collections of aphorisms. The museum is open 10-5, Mon-Sat and admission is free.
The Moscow State University still has some faculties in the neoclassical buildings further along Ulitsa Mokhovaya behind a statue of Lomonosov. The next building, on the other side of the church, houses the Institute of Asian and African Studies and the "Stolovaya". This canteen is open to the public and serves cheap and reasonable food every weekday from 10am to 6pm and from 10-3 on Saturdays. Although students pay even less, the 150 ruble set lunch is a fantastic bargain, especially considering the central location and the new tent-like dining hall with paintings of the MGU campus.
Go on, past the Geological Museum and the National Hotel, and turn left up Tverskaya. From the Yermolova Theatre you can get cheap tickets for classic comedies or a marathon romantic drama about the life of Pushkin, before crossing under the perekhod to Kamergersky Pereulok with its statue of Chekhov and the famous Moscow Arts' Theatre. Here you will find an old-fashioned medical bookshop with old surgical tools and a skeleton. The shop has been there for seventy years and has an album under the counter bulging with letters and postcards from grateful students around the world. One of the pedagogical branches of the prolific Dom Khigi is at the end of the road with a further branch straight on across Bolshaya Dmitrovskaya, opposite an Art Nouveau house with a mural of a falcon. This venerable children's book shop has chandaliers and paintings of famous Russian authors.
Cross over two more roads, heading in the same direction, to reach pedestrianised Kuznetsky Most. The wonderful "Atlas" map shop is here, along with an antiquarian bookstore and Dom Knigi's "House of Foreign Books", which has a great selection of fiction and non-fiction in the wood-panelled interior. Turn right into Rozhdestvenka and right again into Pushechnaya Ulitsa. Past Moo Moo and a Sushi bar, an unpromising door advertising a travel agents at number 7/5 leads to the Ex Libris Museum on the second floor. Open 10-6 Monday to Friday, this is another hidden treasure trove of unusual books, etched illustrations and artistic book-plates. Admission is free. Go back to Ulitsa Rozhdestvenka, turn right and cross under Teatralny Proezd. The statue on the far side, in front of the Mazerati show room, is Ivan Fyodorov, the printer who produced that first book in 1564.
The printing house where Ivan Fyodorov worked was on Nikolskaya Ulitsa which is through the huge archway to the right of his statue, and along Tretyakovsky Proezd. Looking right along the shop-lined street, you can see the ornate pillars of the white and turquoise Synodal printing house which has replaced the older workshop. If you go to have a look at the building, which still has the print yard's lion and unicorn motif above the door, you will also pass the site of the Slavyanskiy Bazaar where Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko were dining when they planned the foundation of the Moscow Arts' Theatre. A little further on, a church in a dilapidated courtyard, is all that is left of the Zaikonospassky Monastery. This was where the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy was established, where Lomonosov studied. Walk all the way back along Nikoslkaya Ulitsa, past the archway you arrived through, to the underpass under the road junction at Lubyanka. On the way, you pass Bolshoi Cherkassky Pereulok on your right. If you are particularly interested in French books, you should definitely check out "Pangloss", hidden in the courtyard at number 13/14, building 4 (Mon-Sat, 10-7).
The experimental poet, artist and playwright, Vladimir Mayakovsky, lived and died in a tiny room in the apartment block at 3/6 Lubyansky Proezd, on the far side of Lubyanskaya Ploschad. The whole block has been made into a museum (10-5, Fri-Tues 50/90 rubles for residents/foreigners) which is well worth visiting even if you have no interest in avant garde poetry. The (literally) iconoclastic exhibits use surreal and distorted installations to represent aspects of Mayakovsky's life and work. The entrance, near a sculpture of the poet's head, is through a funky bookshop at the start of Myasnitskaya Ulitsa.
The Biblio Globus book shop next door is one of Moscow's bigget, oldest and most crowded. It has an excellent selection of books about Moscow on the way downstairs. In the basement the "Literary Cafe" serves business lunches. Lubyanka Metro station is very close by, but there is one more literary landmark in the vicinity. A little further along Myasnitskaya Ulitsa, the bright blue rococo mansion at number 7. The nineteenth century archeologist, Chertkov, compiled a huge collection of books here, which later formed the foundation of the Russian State Library. Visitors included Pushkin, Tolstoy and Gogol.
KIDS' STUFF
The exhibits in the Book museum are diverse, from papyrus and quills to seashell-encrusted mock-maritime journals. The most appealing museum on the route is probably Mayakovsky's house whose surreal exhibits and spiral ramps appeal to the whole family.
Another place along the route that is worth a look is the Mkhat museum inside the theatre building on Kamergersky Pereulok with its collections of elabourate costumes and wonderful doll's house-like set designs.