State Tomb – Kommersant

On May 10, 2023, the State Hermitage Museum and the Holy Trinity Alexander Nevsky Lavra entered into an agreement on the transfer of the memorial complex of the tomb of Alexander Nevsky for free temporary use. The State Hermitage is handing over the monument for 49 years with the possibility of extending this period. The document was approved and approved by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’. At the same time, the tomb remains state property and part of the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation. comments Kira Dolinina.

It must be admitted that those who have been following the fate of the tomb of Alexander Nevsky, which has been discussed by the Church and the Hermitage for twenty years now, were not very surprised by the news. Back in the early 2000s, separate groups of Orthodox social activists demanded that the shrine be returned to the Lavra. They wrote letters, they did not really answer. But in October 2012, Vladimir Medinsky, who was then Minister of Culture, suddenly said that “a copy of the shrine will be made for the Hermitage, and the original will be returned to the Lavra, where it should be.” In November of the same year, he had to take back his words: “There is no question of any transfer of the shrine to the church,” “We are only talking about the need to make a copy of the shrine. And what will happen to this shrine later, we don’t know yet, and who will get a copy and who will get the original, we have not even discussed yet. Let the copy become reality first.”

Thus, the issue was transferred to the financial plane and the main principle of balancing the interests of both parties was spoken – making a copy. Meanwhile, the Hermitage began the restoration of the monument. A year later, in 2013, Mikhail Piotrovsky confirmed that upon completion of the restoration, the museum would be ready to start making a copy, but there was no money yet: “There is no Orthodox patron of the arts who would provide money, and the state asks us if it can be cheaper. But the rector of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra is right: it can’t be cheaper, you need to make an exact copy of silver, which, by the way, is not so much there. ” Before the current agreement, who would get the original and who would get a copy was considered more or less obvious: the museum was not going to part with its property, barely saved from being melted down by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s. And that’s true – the religious meaning of this baroque hulk is solely in the fact that it “contacted” with the relics of the saint, and that which came into contact with the holy relics becomes a shrine for the believer. A skilful diplomat, Piotrovsky, in response to such reasoning, replied that after all, even a copy, having come into contact with the same relics in a lavra, would become a shrine.

In the museum, over time, they began to say that the money for a copy was found and work began. There was no official announcement about this. The current treaty means one thing: the situation has turned exactly 180 degrees. Mikhail Piotrovsky had to surrender this bastion and do it with a cute face on his face: “The Hermitage proceeds from the fact that at this geopolitical moment for the fate of the country and the social world in it, the combination of relics with a tomb on the territory of the Lavra takes on a special meaning. Today, the sacred meaning of the monument is more important than its artistic value.”

At one time, the appearance of a shrine in the Winter Palace was not an accident, but a programmatic anti-religious gesture of the young Soviet state. True, the relics themselves, unearthed in 1922, still did not dare to drag them to the Hermitage. The bone remains that survived the fires of the 14th and 18th centuries were sent to a special anti-church institution – the State Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism (Kazan Cathedral), from where they were safely returned to the church in due time.

In the Hermitage, the empty tomb was held not by the department of church art, but as a symbol of the greatness of the Russian people. The memory of the glorious victories of the prince, extremely important at special moments in the history of Russia, through this composition, almost the largest of its kind in Europe of the 18th century, was included in the exposition as a continuation of the halls telling about the victories of Russian weapons in 1812. This cancer was not known as a great work of art, causing interest primarily in the amount of silver that went into it. Another thing is that, if it were not a museum exhibit, the Bolsheviks would have melted it down, like tons of other church property. In 1929, in order to save her, the Hermitage had to exchange 6,736 silver coins, 389 items of church utensils, 3 items of gold from their funds to a special unit under the State Fund, and all of them were accepted by the commission by weight as simple scrap.

But in today’s conditions, this exhibit is given a special ideological significance. Director Piotrovsky, with his recently proclaimed sense of “acute social and historical responsibility,” had to find an explanation: “Given the current geopolitical situation and the symbolic role of St. connect the shrine, the tomb and the relics of the saint on the territory of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra”. In this rhetoric, the words that the church is obliged to store the shrine in a strict museum regime (otherwise the museum can terminate the contract unilaterally) seem almost superfluous. Rublev’s “Trinity” was almost killed in 2022, the cancer will obviously be stronger and its 49 years under this agreement will quietly stand in the cathedral.