RUSSIA: Kremlin Museum in Moscow for the first time ever exhibits gifts made to Soviet leaders

The Kremlin Museum in Moscow opened Russia's first-ever exhibit of gifts made to the leaders of the Soviet era. Titled "Gifts to Soviet Leaders'', over 500 gifts made to Soviet leaders from Vladimir Lenin to Mikhail Gorbachev are on display. Museum curators had to select items for display from several tens of thousands of items given to Soviet leaders from 1921 to 1990, many of which have never been seen before. For many years these gifts have sat forgotten in the vaults of 13 of Russia's museums. The items on display include exquisite and intricate works of art, simple and unassuming tokens of ordinary citizens' gratitude, gifts from heads of state, as well as personal belongings. The exhibit, opened on October 26 and runs until November 26. As visitors enter the exhibit, a large screen shows a film clip of Stalin from a communist party congress in the 1930s. At one point he receives a rifle, and then ominously points the weapon towards the audience of leading communists. A year later most of the men present had been executed by the secret police. The exhibit has many portraits of Lenin made by ordinary people throughout the seven decades of Soviet rule. One of the most intricate is a portrait made in 1981 by Ukrainian peasants entirely from different sorts of grain. The different shades of brown were carefully positioned to give an excellent rendering of the revolutionary leader. One of the most bizarre gifts is another portrait of Lenin, but this one made entirely from human hair. It was a gift from a Moscow barber to the Soviet government in the early 1930s. The tradition of making gifts to leaders, however, began much earlier. The earliest gift in the exhibit dates to 1921 just as the Soviet Union was emerging from three years of civil war. Among some of the earliest gifts on display are a 1921 bronze statue titled "Blacksmith of Peace'' that was given from workers at a metal works in the Ural region city of Kusinsk to Vladimir Lenin on November 7, 1922, the fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power. Since Lenin died in 1924, the exhibit does not have that many gifts to him. Gifts to Joseph Stalin, whose reign stretched almost 25 years, are the most numerous. Peasants, workers and heads of state gave the dictator over 20,000 presents just for his 70th birthday in 1949. "Now we have 15 years of distance from the Soviet era which ended in 1991,'' said Zelfira Tregulova, deputy director of the Kremlin Museum. And now the time came to present this material in a more objective way than it was presented before.'' One of the most exquisite pieces in the exhibit is a model of an oil rig, entirely crafted from silver, made by Azerbaijani workers and given to Lenin on Nov. 7, 1922, to mark the fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power. Two vases from Leningrad's Lomonosov Porcelain Factory, - recently renamed the Imperial Porcelain Factry - that made porcelain exclusively for the tsars, depict scenes from Soviet history and were given to Stalin to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power. One depicts Lenin speaking to workers in 1917, while the second shows Stalin appearing before revolutionaries on the eve of the Bolshevik coup d'etat. "Some of the people were giving the gifts to leaders as a sincere movement of soul,'' said Zelfira Tregulova, deputy director of the Kremlin Museum. "Because the official ideology managed to impose in their brains the idea that what they're having now, their happy present, is a kind of gift from leaders, a gift from 'god', and it's like a great great present. And in order to somehow express their gratitude to these leaders they should give some present which an expression of their gratitude.'' Besides personal gifts to Soviet leaders for their birthday and commemorating important dates in Soviet history, some gifts were marked Congresses of the Communist Party. One of the most bizarre gifts is the pneumatic hammer used by Alexei Stakhanov, the celebrated Soviet worker famous for mining 104 tonnes of coal in a single shift, more than seven times the plan. Shortly before his death, he gave that hammer to the Komsomol (Communist) Youth League in 1974. Reactions to the exhibit were mixed and often broke along generational lines. Old people who came were often those who still look upon the Soviet period with sympathy, and wanted to see items from their youth. "First, we came here because this is our past,'' said Moscow pensioner, Natalia Vasilevna. ``We still remember the exhibits dedicated to Stalin that were held in the Museum of the Revolution. It's interesting to see all of this now because we've forgotten about it.'' Younger people, who make up a generation that is cynical about nearly everything, often found the naivete and exuberance of Soviet citizens to be grotesque and even at times amusing and pathetic. "I came here to finding something that would prove wrong my image of Soviet leaders, but in fact there's nothing here that has changed my image of them,'' said Moscow student, Yulya. One thing that most visitors agreed upon, regardless of their age, was that most Russian people would hardly be inspired to make such fine gifts to their leaders today. Few current Russian leaders merit such respect and admiration, visitors to the exhibit said in unison.

ITN Source | November 15, 2006

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