When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it laid siege to Mariupol, a strategic port metropolis within the east of the nation, with 1000’s killed as bombs and artillery destroyed housing, museums and the native theatre. Now, Russian authorities have introduced plans to memorialise the destruction of the occupied metropolis within the Donbas—which it blames on Ukraine—with a brand new “museum of the liberation of Mariupol”, scheduled to open in summer time 2024.
Because the invasion enters its third yr, the “liberation museum” is a part of a Kremlin marketing campaign to make use of museums as battle propaganda venues, each throughout Russia and in occupied areas of Ukraine, which Russian officers discuss with as “new territories of Russia” or Novorossiya, a tsarist-era colonial time period.
Talking on 30 January at a convention held on the VDNH Stalin-era fairgrounds in Moscow, Olga Lyubimova, Russia’s tradition minister, mentioned the museums might be “devoted to the trendy historical past of Donbass and Novorossiya”—the Tass information company reported her as saying and used the Russian spelling of Donbas—and embody “genuine objects, paperwork, supplies devoted to the event of our nation and preserving the reminiscence of the exploits of our compatriots”.
VDNH has been changed into a showcase for Kremlin ideology and was the December launchpad for Vladimir Putin’s newest presidential run. Elections are scheduled for mid-March. In 2015, VDNH was the primary web site of the Russia My Historical past “historical past park”, curated by Tikhon Shevkunov, a robust Russian Orthodox bishop. “Exhibitions primarily based on these methodological supplies are positioned in regional and municipal museums, libraries and public areas,” Lyubimova reportedly mentioned on the convention. “Greater than 1,800 tasks have already been [launched] in museums. In 2024, at the very least 450 extra such [displays] and exhibitions might be created all through the nation.”
The Artwork Newspaper has seen a 28-page doc titled “Methodological Suggestions for Creating Exhibitions Devoted to the Historical past of the Particular Navy Operation in Museums of the Russian Federation”. The “particular army operation,” abbreviated in Russian as SVO, is the Kremlin’s official time period for the battle.
The “methodological suggestions” embody museum exhibitions displaying that the SVO was wanted to guard the “Russian-speaking inhabitants” from “army aggression carried out within the Donbass” by Ukraine “since April 2014”, and “to guard the Russian Federation from an impending assault by the Armed Forces of Ukraine”.
The doc was compiled by the tradition ministry, the up to date historical past museum and the Russian Historic Society in response to Putin’s April 2023 order to create museums nationwide devoted to Russia’s battle with Ukraine.
The paper warrior: Russia’s president Vladimir Putin with Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister
Photograph © kremlin.ru
“Some of the necessary components making certain the unity and consolidation of Russian society inside the nation is the preservation of the continuity of religious and ethical values and the safety of historic reality,” the doc states. That is to be finished by creating “museums [and exhibitions] devoted to its historical past” and displaying artefacts as central to the trouble. Ukraine’s authorities is known as a “Nazi regime” and Novorossiya as “a part of the historical past of Russia for the reason that finish of the 18th century”.
Among the many suggestions for SVO museum exhibitions and artefacts for show are: “small arms, and so on (particularly edged weapons with Nazi symbols), together with overseas manufacturing”; “youngsters’s toys with traces of blood, broken toys (dolls, vehicles, and so on)”; “devices of torture”; “prohibited Ukrainian and Nato ammunition (neutralised); fragments of ammunition and missiles”.
The State Historic Museum on Pink Sq. held a serious Novorossiya exhibition in 2023, from the reign of Catherine the Nice to the SVO. The museum described post-Soviet unbiased Ukraine as reworking into an “Anti-Russia” and “launching the method of Nazification, militarisation and its entry into Nato”. The museum’s director Alexey Levykin despatched staff to the Russian-occupied Luhansk area to collect artefacts.
Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, instructed Russia’s RBC channel in December that the Hermitage is “working to assist restore museums in new territories”, together with Mariupol.
