The Historical Museum in Moscow expects to return to suspended international projects

The State Historical Museum (GIM) and some of its partners in Europe were forced to suspend a number of joint exhibition projects, but the GIM expects to return to them, said the director of the GIM, Alexei Levykin, in an exclusive interview with Kommersant.

According to him, after the fall of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s, there was “a peak of interest in those collections that were kept in Russian museums”: “The interest that was in the United States of America, in Europe, was expressed in the fact that large-scale, powerful exhibitions were visited by millions of people. This played a very important role both for the development of culture in Western Europe and America, and for us, because we got the opportunity to organize bright exhibition projects at our sites, it was an exchange.”

After the imposition of sanctions against the Russian Federation, this exchange was significantly reduced: “We were forced to suspend a number of international projects with museums in Italy and Germany – for example, a very bright project that began with an exhibition of Dürer’s graphics from the collection of the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo in Brescia. It has become one of the most popular exhibitions in 2021 in Moscow,” said Alexei Levykin. “The next step was to be another exhibition in 2022 — from the museums of Genoa, but it did not take place. I look forward to implementing these projects in the future. The suspension was not our will or the will of our partners, it is the will of other people who made political decisions to “cancel” Russian culture in the world. But I think it will pass. In any case, in this case, the curtain is not lowered by us – it is lowered in front of us, as, by the way, after 1945, when our recent allies lowered the iron curtain. Then the curtain had to wait for about 40 years, but I think that this time it will rise again. And we are still actively working: we have very good contacts with museums in China. Recently I had a meeting with the Ambassador of Iran: we are interested in the culture of this country. There is the Middle East, there is India. We will develop these areas. Of course, this requires time, evaluation and selection of collections that will be of interest to our viewer, who has had a good experience visiting the world’s leading museums. But we will try.”

Mr Levykin also toldthat attendance at the museum complex is recovering after the pandemic. The share of foreign tourists in 2022 decreased from 25% to 1.5% amid the military operation and rose to 2.6% in the first half of 2023.

More details – in an interview with Alexei Levykin “Kommersant” “”The continuous progressive course of history – this is the main masterpiece that we have””.