Zelfira Tregulova in the Tretyakov Gallery was replaced by the general’s daughter
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Who is Elena Pronicheva
Zelfira Tregulova, who has headed the Tretyakov Gallery since 2015, did not renew her contract. The question of whether or not to keep her in office was a difficult and painful decision. The contract with the director of the State Tretyakov Gallery expired on 7 February. The question hung in the air for several days. The Ministry of Culture thought and thought and thought up in the night. According to MK, the contract with Tregulova was re-signed on the evening of February 8, and canceled a few hours later. As a result, the chair of the director of the main national gallery of the country was given to 39-year-old Elena Pronicheva, the general’s daughter, who began her career in the Duma Committee on Budget and Taxes, then worked as the executive director of the Jewish Museum and the Tolerance Center, and since 2020 headed the Polytechnic Museum.
Rumors that Zelfira Ismailovna could be removed from her post have been circulating over the past few weeks. Recent scandals were recalled – from the removal of the “Trinity” from the museum, which was opposed by experts, but Zelfira still personally signed the order to issue the icon, until the recent case with a letter from a vigilant citizen who saw in the State Tretyakov Gallery “signs of a destructive ideology” and insisted on checking the museum works “for compliance with spiritual and moral values”.
Under Tregulova, there were many scandals. Older ones are also remembered, which seem to have been forgiven and forgotten – like the theft of Kuindzhi’s painting, which happened in front of everyone, or the attack on Repin’s painting “Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan”, which also happened under the nose of the caretaker. And relatively recent – like an unscheduled financial audit of the Ministry of Culture a year ago, which revealed violations, which, however, were not announced in detail, but subsequently one employee was fired, and the cost of purchases made in a non-competitive way from the only supplier of the contractor or contractor was limited to 50 million rub. Or the scandal with the closure of the exhibition of Grisha Bruskin in the spring of 2022 – the project managed to work for several weeks and suddenly closed “due to technical reasons.” After each such episode, it was whispered on the sidelines that the chair under Zelfira Ismailovna was rocking, or someone was rocking it, and they complained that all the strange stories take place in secrecy and without clear explanations from the public.
Despite all this, Tregulova retained a reputation as a strong museum manager and a savvy art critic. A graduate of the art department of the history department of Moscow State University, she underwent an internship at the Guggenheim Museum, was responsible for foreign relations at the Pushkin Museum, worked for 11 years at the Moscow Kremlin Museums as deputy director for exhibition work and international projects, headed ROSIZO, from where she came to the position of director of the Tretyakov Gallery in 2015. During her time in the State Tretyakov Gallery, many large-scale meaningful projects were carried out. There were no exhibitions where paintings were simply hung on the wall without a curatorial idea. Branches of the State Tretyakov Gallery were opened, among which, for example, the Museum of Pavel and Sergei Tretyakov. It is located in a historic house where brothers-philanthropists grew up. For a long time the building could not be restored, but it happened under Tregulova. Under her leadership, regional branches were conceived in Vladivostok, Kaliningrad and Samara. As a result, in Samara in 2021, the museum opened in a constructivist factory-kitchen building. In Vladivostok, the State Tretyakov Gallery is still working at a temporary site, and they plan to open a branch this year. A large construction site in Kaliningrad is underway – it was going to be completed by the end of this year. And in this all there is a great merit of Tregulova.
So the decision to remove her from office was not an easy one. Behind him are clearly behind-the-scenes games and the struggle of different forces. Various candidates for possible successors were named. From Ivan Demidov, under whose wing the Manezh was recently given (and this platform is called a springboard – it was from there that Marina Loshak jumped into the chair of the director of the Pushkin Museum), to the first deputy Tregulova Rinat Shigapov. But the surname of the Pronichev sisters sounded louder than the others. The eldest of them – Ekaterina Pronicheva – in the summer of 2022 has already been appointed to the position of general director of the Vladimir-Suzdal Museum-Reserve. Recall that preparations are now in full swing for the celebration of the 1000th anniversary of Suzdal, and just a couple of days before the appointment of Ekaterina Vladimirovna, more than a billion rubles were allocated for it. In a word, she has something to do in Suzdal. But the youngest daughter of the general who led the Border Guard Service of the FSB of Russia until 2013, Elena Pronicheva, somehow got stuck in the Polytechnic Museum, which they have been trying to reconstruct for years and still nothing. The museum was closed nine years ago, and the cost of works during this time has increased by 2.5 times. It was planned to open the reconstructed Polytechnic University at the end of 2021, but in 2022 the deadline was postponed until 2025. The 150th anniversary of the science museum, which fell on 2022, despite all attempts to designate it with virtual and regional exhibitions, did not work out. Elena Pronicheva’s ambitions require reaching a new museum level. Much higher than the Tretyakov Gallery.
The obvious minus of the candidacy of Elena Pronicheva (at least for the museum community) is that she does not have an art history education. In 2005, she graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) with a degree in comparative politics. Ten years ago, she began to enter the museum business, taking the position of executive director of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center. In 2015–2020, she worked in a similar position at the Federal Scientific and Methodological Center for the Psychology and Pedagogy of Tolerance. In a word, Elena Vladimirovna is a manager. Time will tell how and where she will lead a large museum ship called the Tretyakov Gallery. If Pronicheva behaves wisely, she will entrust cultural policy issues to specialists, especially since the exhibition plan for this year has already been determined, and there is a reserve for the next few years (after the February events, Tregulova managed to redraw exhibition tasks for a five-year period, if not in detail, then approximately ). And he will throw his strength into managerial tasks, of which there are many. And here the experience of a political scientist should come in handy.
One of the most difficult problems for the new director is the long-term construction of the new building of the State Tretyakov Gallery on Kadashevskaya Embankment. The branch was conceived back in 2007, but construction could not start for years. Long before Tregulova, there was a scandal with the theft of 87 million rubles pledged for the project. The story of the deputy director of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Oleg Belikov, who was accused of financial fraud, is dark, but as a result, in 2014, Belikov was sentenced to 5 years. Under Tregulova, construction got off the ground – it was assumed that the branch would be completed by December 2023 and opened in 2024. So it was said back in October, and then behind-the-scenes conversations arose again that something was going wrong with the branch. For Elena Pronicheva, this task will be a test of strength, and let’s hope that it will turn out differently than with the Polytechnic University.
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