Gifts to Soviet leaders: Exhibition of the Kremlin Museum, Moscow

[A Smith]

Gifts to Soviet leaders

Exhibition of the Kremlin Museum, Moscow (Malyi Manezh, October – December 2006)
OPENING THURSDAY 26 OCTOBER 2006

This exhibition is a part of research project that explores Soviet-era politics
and material culture through an unusual perspective: by looking at gifts that
the Soviet leaders received from both Soviet subjects and international leaders
and movements. It comprises about 500 objects that illustrate gift practices
over the period of Soviet history from Lenin to Gorbachev (1917-1991). These
gifts ranged from models of military hardware (of a nuclear missile, for
example, that was presented to Brezhnev) and international honours (such as the
Sward of Honour from Britain for the Battle of Stalingrad) to exemplars of
industrial and petty-commodity production (pieces of Trans-Siberian railroad
among other, less extreme examples such as shoes or rugs) to samples of natural
resources and applied art objects (e.g. a pipe ‘from the U.S. to the Soviet
people’ with the carved figurines of Stalin and Truman paying chess).

This exhibition opens a window into the Soviet-era ‘world map’ of politics and
identity markers and, at the same time, into socially-intimate operations of
power (e.g. the ‘love for the leader’) which underscore the manufacturing of
these gifts. It combines the display of these gifts with illustration of their
social biographies — which are documented using both archival materials and
interviews that were collect in the course of research into these topics. The
goal of this exhibition is to create a cultural commentary on the Soviet-era
technologies of power in direct encounters (however staged), transactions and
correspondence between socialist leaders, their subjects, and other heads of
states.

The exhibition engages in the public reflection on the central themes of Soviet
history such as the position of, and relations with, the socialist state
leaders; it also engages the public to think outside the taken for granted
exhibition categories such as ‘art’, ‘applied arts’, 'history' and
‘ethnography’.

 Curators: Dr Olga Sosnina (Kremlin Museum), Dr Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov
(University of Cambridge)

Dr Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov 
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Cambridge
Free School Lane
Cambridge CB2 3RF
Tel (01223) 334599
Fax (01223) 335993
E-mail ns267 at cam.ac.uk <mailto:ns267 at cam.ac.uk> 

Dr Olga Sosnina
The Kremlin Museum
Manezhnaia pl. 7
Moscow
Tel./fax. (+7)495 2029558
e-mail: sosnina at kremlin.museum.ru <mailto:sosnina at kremlin.museum.ru> 

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