The Central Anti-Religious Museum, Moscow
Collecting Against the Gods: A Museum Like None Before It
by Ekaterina Teryukova
Figure 1. Anti-religious propaganda at the tent-roofed gate tower of former Strastnoi Monastery in Moscow. Photo from the collection of the State Museum of the History of Religion, A-587.
On June 10, 1929, the doors of the former Strastnoi Monastery in Moscow opened to welcome the visitors of the new Central Anti-Religious Museum, the first such museum in the USSR and, at the time, the only one in the world. The event was timed to coincide with the 2nd Congress of the League of Militant Atheists, the anti-religious public organization founded in Soviet Russia in 1925. The new museum was run under its auspices.
In the late 1930s, the history of the museum’s foundation was told in great detail in The Way of Struggle (A Memoir of Organizing the Central Anti-Religious Museum) by Boris Kandidov, a historian of religion and an anti-religious propaganda activist, who initiated the museum’s foundation, and served as its first director. He remembered that, on the opening day, ‘so many people wanted to get in that we were unable to let them all in. Crowds of people stood by the entrance door. We had to call for a special police unit; there were several incidents.’ In his book he described his anti-religious work with the general public in the 1920s, which had demonstrated the power of documents, paintings and other art object
The Museum’s Background
The history of the Central Anti-Religious Museum had begun in the spring of 1926, when the meeting under the auspices of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party made a series of decisions on anti-religious propaganda. It was decided to undertake the organization of a specialized anti-religious museum institution. In the autumn of the same year, Boris Kandidov and other historians of religion and atheist propagandists sent a proposal for the future museum to the Chairman of League of Militant Atheists, Emelyan Yaroslavsky. They envisioned its main goal as ‘anti-religious advocacy and propaganda’. Even at this preliminary level, collecting was seen as a no less important area of work, and the proposal included plans for museum archives, a library, and a collection of objects.
Work on the museum project began in October 1926. At this stage, the main problems were the lack of either regular funding or a building that would be suitable for museum needs. Until 1927, the museum was located in the Moscow Military Engineering School, which had hosted the ‘Bauman Exhibition’ organized by Kandidov, and named after a district of Moscow. Officially, the exhibition was titled ‘Church and Revolution’ and informed the public of the activities of religious organizations in Russia during the events of 1917. After the spring of 1927, the museum took up the former warehouse in Yeletsky Lane, and in the summer of 1928 the Moscow Government decided to hand the former Strastnoi Monastery over to the museum. Kandidov admitted that he ‘had long had his eye on the building for his museum’.
Figure 2. The permanent exhibition of the Central Anti-Religious Museum. The Department “Sacralization of the throne”. Photo from the collection of the State Museum of the History of Religion, А-599-09
Strastnoi Monastery in Moscow
Strastnoi Monastery was founded by Tsar Aleksey Romanov (Tsar Alexis of Russia) in 1654. Its name – ‘passion’ – references the Icon of the Mother of God of the Passion, so called because, on the sides of the face of the Mother of God, there are two angels bearing the instruments of the Passion. In 1641, the icon was moved to Moscow from Nizhny Novgorod by Tsar Mikhail Romanov (Michael of Russia). In 1812, when the Napoleonic army entered Moscow, the city suffered a great fire. The monastery burnt to the ground. It was rebuilt after the war, and at this point the tent-roofed gate bell tower with a clock that we know so well from drawings and photographs was added. In 1919, the monastery was suppressed. Its premises were given over to a variety of Soviet institutions: a military commissariat, a students’ dormitory, and the Central Archives. The city outside the monastery walls was also undergoing drastic changes. In 1928, the project of the reconstruction of Gorky Street (Moscow’s main traffic artery) led to the decision to demolish the monastery. However, the plans could not be implemented for lack of funding. The building thus became the temporary shelter to a museum like none before it — an anti-religious museum. The tent-roofed gate tower was now used to display advertisements. Its façade showed off large and bright posters, as well as portraits of political activists and propaganda displays.
The First Exhibitions
The first permanent exhibition of the museum was put up quickly, in the space of two months. Most of the objects on display were religious mementos that, according to the organizers, were to be shown in a way that would ‘unmask the class nature of religion’. In designing the museum layout, Kandidov enlisted the help of Dmitry Moor, a very famous Soviet artist and author of many posters. As Kandidov wrote in his memoir, in those days, the museum display had many faults, but in some areas the results were good. The exhibition of relics was, he thought, an unquestionable success: it amounted to several dozen objects and included relics of Russia's most revered saints, for example, the Three Martyrs of Vilnius, St. Theodosius of Totma, Saint Alexander Nevsky, and Saint Seraphim of Sarov. In Moor’s exhibition design, the relics were laid out on display in the centre of the room titled ‘October and Religion’. The relics were displayed in a complicated, purpose-made structure, with three showcases placed as three radial lines pointing away from a common centre. Each showcase housed two ‘corpses’ (as the relics were called in the memoir). The upper part of the display case consisted of a glass cube with shelves holding mummified animals. Above them, there was a large collection jar from the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius. According to Kandidov, this exhibition ‘used visual means to explain to the viewer that there was nothing miraculous in the preservation of corpses’. The relics were displayed in such a way as to ‘involuntarily destroy the feeling of religious “worship” and “adoration”’, to emphasize the naturalness of mummification, and to demonstrate the economic aspect of the cult of relics through the income of the clergy.
The very first days showed that the general public was greatly interested in the museum. Its opening received a wide and positive media coverage. However, the authors of the exhibition remained self-critical. In his interviews, Kandidov emphasized that a lot was done from scratch and the museum should be closed down again so that additional improvements could be made. This process of modification and amendment was to become never-ending, as shown by historical documents preserved at the Research Archives of the State Museum of the History of Religion in St. Petersburg. The exhibition would continue developing throughout the 1930s as new objects were added to the collection. Kandidov himself became seriously ill after the museum was opened. The work on the museum’s foundation, which he later called in his memoir ‘the way of struggle’, proved detrimental to his health, and he resigned from the job.
A newspaper article published in August 1930 in the German newspaper Berlin am Morgen provides some clues about the museum’s development. It was written after a visit to the museum by two German citizens, Lothar Wolf and Martha Ruben-Wolf. The article was entitled ‘Opium of the Masses’, and it opened with the following description:
In Moscow, on Strastnaya Square, there stands the almost-300-year-old Strastnoi Monastery. These are ill times for monasteries in Russia. Believers pay little, and the state, which used to be very generous towards monasteries in the old days, is now the Soviet State and not only gives no more, but also demands taxes. Therefore, the impoverished and dilapidated monastery recently ceased to exist due to hygienic and sanitary reasons. This ghost of tsarist spiritual slavery has been transformed into the Central Anti-Religious Museum. Even from the outside, it attracts one with its propaganda. On the First of May, the figure of the ruling capital stood high on its façade holding Orthodox priests, rabbis, clergymen, and mullahs on a leash.
The authors noted that ‘the nature of propaganda changes once the spectator enters the permanent exhibition located in three church rooms’, where he is offered ‘the most sophisticated, deeply elaborated teachings’ on a variety of topics. For example, to answer the question of human origin, ‘very simply, clearly, in a way accessible even to the illiterate, the pictures present the development of plants, animals, and humans themselves’ in accordance with Darwin’s theory of the evolution of the species. The authors then asked themselves what those scientific achievements had to do with religion, and answered, ‘All religions have fought against scientific knowledge’. Another question that the museum’s exhibition answered for the international guests was, ‘What is God? How does God originate and develop?’ That was the subject of the section titled ‘The Origin and Development of Religion’. It told the story of ‘how Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Jews, Greeks, Romans, Germans, and Slavs came to create concepts of God’. A special subsection covered the religions of India, China, and Japan. Further along, a separate great hall told the story of the origins of Christianity. The authors noted that the creators of the exhibition had not failed to draw attention to the burning issues of contemporary religious life. That was the subject of the section entitled ‘Religion as a Capitalist Enterprise’. The article describes how, along with authentic objects, the exhibition showcased ‘countless pictures, figures, tables, and geographical maps’, as well as set scenes, such as those of a church stall selling icons, painted Easter eggs, wax candles etc. The latter scene was supposed to demonstrate how one needs to be a skilful manager in order to gain income. The review ended with the fact that the museum ‘was teeming with spectators’ and that ‘where there used to be an altar, there was now a geographical map showing the locations throughout the Soviet Union that boasted anti-religious exhibitions inspired by the Central Anti-Religious Museum’.
Figure 3. Workers in the Central Anti-Religious Museum. Photo from the collection of the State Museum of the History of Religion, А-0804.
Collection Formation
Collecting was mentioned as a significant part of the museum’s activities as early as 1926, in the project documentation presented by Boris Kandidov. Kandidov regarded this work as ‘most important and most interesting’, and he developed his own methodology of ‘collecting material in religious nests’ (former churches, monasteries, sect communities). With an official permit in hand, he pretended to be an enthusiast for church antiquities and engaged ‘the holy fathers’ in ‘spiritual talk’ on the historical value of church materials. This granted Kandidov a way into hundreds of church basements and bell towers, libraries and archives in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Zhitomir, Kaluga, Sebastopol, Simferopol. He records how ‘the diplomatic ploy was to keep silent about the class significance’ of the objects he was able to find, as well as the fact that they were going to be used to fight against religion. In 1926–27, museum objects were also sent from the League of Militant Atheists, the Main Directorate of Science, Museum, Research and Art Institutions of the People’s Commissariat of Education of Russia, and the Main Directorate for Criminal Investigation.
In the 1930s, the work on forming collections was carried out according to plan. Along with religious institutions on the verge of closure, other sources of objects were purchases from private citizens, museum exchange, and specific commissions from artists and sculptors. One of the main goals in this period was to create a collection that would make it possible to present all topics through authentic, high-quality, multidimensional material, since the first exhibitions had often been criticized for being ‘flat’, i.e. mostly relying on documents. For example, in 1934, the museum expanded its collection by 1,554 objects. Some of them were received through exchange with Leningrad museums: the Buddhist collection from the Museum of the History of Religion in the former Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan in Leningrad, copies and originals for the ‘Religion in Pre-Class Society’ from the Museum of the History of Religion and the Kunstkamera, a collection of religious objects and prints from the Russian Museum. The collection of icons and church objects expanded due to the closure of Moscow churches. The Museum of the People’s Commissariat of Public Health gave a mummy of a counterfeiter and the relics of St. Joasaph of Belgorod and St. Eustathius of Vilnius. All in all, eight field trips were undertaken in search for museum objects, including those to the Moscow region, the Crimea, and Chernigov. In Chernigov, the Sosnytsia and Chernigov Museum was explored and agreements were made to obtain more material. Approximately 40 objects – Ukranian icons and other 18th–19th century household objects ‘characterizing the class face of the rural church’ – were brought back to Moscow.
In the 1930s, research expeditions to remote districts of the country became an important source of collection expansion. For greater efficiency, the expedition engaged third-party experts. For instance, Evgeny Shilling, a famous Soviet researcher of the Caucasus Region, contributed to the collection devoted to religious beliefs of the Caucasus. As a result of the Adygea field trip of 1930, the Dagestan trips of 1934, 1935, 1936, 1940, the West Cherkessia trip of 1930, and the Caucasus trip of 1938, the museum collection was expanded by more than 130 items reflecting both the Islamic and the pre-Muslim components of Eastern Caucasus beliefs.
In the mid-1930s, to expand the Muslim collection, the museum’s director, Pavel Fedorovich, commissioned I. Muradov, who was not on the museum staff, to collect objects in Uzbekistan (Tashkent and Samarkand) and send them to Moscow. His work resulted in museum exchange with the Samarkand State Museum, the Museum of Art, the Museum of People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs in Tashkent, and active purchase of objects from private citizens. After 1936, the new ethnographer on the museum staff, Gleb Snesarev, began to focus on Middle Asia and Uzbekistan too. The study of what Soviet scholars used to call ‘religious vestiges’ was the main focus of Snesarev’s expedition to Southern Kyrgyzstan and several districts of the Fergana Valley in Uzbekistan in the spring of 1940. Much of the ethnographer’s time was spent in the city of Osh, where the Mountain of Suleiman was located: this was an immensely popular sacred mountain of Islam, the subject of many a song and legend, attracting pilgrims from Samarkand, Khiva, and Bukhara. Osh was also famous for the residence of ishans, the leaders of the Sufi brotherhood and descendants of the 18th-century Uzbek poet and seer Khojanazar Gaibnazar-oglu Huvaydo. During the expedition, Snesarev collected a large number of objects, including a collection of 15th–19th-century theological manuscripts, amulets against the evil eye and evil spirits, and family relics of the Osh ishans.
Figure 4. Pupils in the Central Anti-Religious Museum. Photo from the collection of the State Museum of the History of Religion.
In 1936, Nikolay Pupyshev, an expert on Buddhism, undertook a collection expedition to the Agin Aimag in Buryat-Mongolia. The purpose of the trip was to visit the previously closed Tsugolsky Datsan and ship Buddhist objects to the museum in Moscow. Drawing up the results of the expedition, Pupyshev pointed out that the museum was unable to receive all of the religious objects, but only a part of them, but the amount was stunning anyway: 3 train cars containing 5,000 objects. As the collector wrote, most of them were dated to the nineteenth or early twentieth century and had been made locally. However, the true value of the Tsugol collection was not measured in quantity, but rather by ‘the fact that, in most cases, it represented whole religious and artistic complexes’. According to Pupyshev, ‘this shipment made the Lamaism collection the top one’ in the museum. In terms of museum display, the most interesting objects were the enormous statue of Matreya Buddha, more than 7 metres high, a model of ‘the Buddhist heaven of more than 64 cubic metres’, a processional elephant with a blanket decorated with gems and a carriage for the statue of Maidari, ‘the Ganjur library: one hundred and ten volumes in silk wrappings stored in two wooden cases’, 385 statues from the ‘1000 Lamas’ series, a felt yurt, and many other treasures.
This expedition resulted in the creation of a permanent Buddhism exhibition at the Moscow museum. We know what it looked like and how it was organized from the collector himself. In 1941, Pupyshev compiled a review of the exhibition, where he pointed out that here the spectator could not only learn about the basics of the Buddhist teachings, but also ‘experience pleasure from viewing rare art objects’. The elephant took its rightful place in the exhibition: ‘In the middle of the first hall, the visitor saw a large statue of a white elephant draped in an expensive brocade blanket embroidered with silk... It has to be said that the elephant statue at the Anti-Religious Museum in Moscow is the only example: there is nothing like this in other museums’. However, even an elephant this beautiful remained in the shadow of the Sukhavati heaven. It became the subject of an article by Pupyshev, where he provided its detailed description and analysis and emphasized that not only had the three-dimensional model of heaven been shipped to Moscow, but was also on permanent display at the museum.
The result of the collection work undertaken in 1934–1941 was a great number of valuable artefacts and art objects related to the history of religion, as well as a library of more than 100,000 volumes, many of them very rare. The collection stimulated museum staff regularly to update the permanent display. On the one hand, it accounted for the Marxist theory of economic formations, while on the other, it provided a historical outlook and shed light on the origins of religious beliefs in prehistoric society, the development of religion in the Ancient World, and the history of the world religions: Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.
Conclusion
The Government of Moscow’s decision to demolish the Strastnoi Monastery was made in 1928; actual demolition began in 1937. The museum now moved into another building, the Church of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker in Kalyaevskaya Street, which had been closed down in 1934. That building underwent a significant reconstruction to adapt it for museum purposes. The museum was intended to have 12 exhibition halls, a Science and Religion Study, a cinema with 100 seats, a library reading room, a large space for item storage, and a separate disinfection chamber and restoration workshop. The leader of the League of Militant Atheists, Emelyan Yaroslavsky, greatly contributed to the project. The apse and the quadrangle of the church were dismantled, and the remaining structure transformed into a two-storey building with an added five-storey structure typical of Stalinist Neoclassicism. The furniture (cases, bookshelves, etc.) were built to special designs. When the work was finished in 1940, the museum’s area was 2½ times greater than that in the Strastnoi Monastery.
On February 20, 1942, the Praesidium of the League of Militant Atheists renamed the museum the ‘Central Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism’. The new name was a result of the vast amount of work on collecting, research, and display. However, in October 1944, the ‘housing issues’ caught up with the museum again. The building in Kalyaevskaya Street was handed over to the Soyuzmulfilm (Soviet Cartoon Films) Studio. As the discussions on allocating another former church were under way, in 1945, the Museum was transferred from the auspices of the League of Militant Atheists to the Academy of Sciences and transformed into the Central Museum of the History of Religion in Moscow. Time passed. The collections remained packed up. The new building was never found. In the end, on March 20, 1947, it was decided to close down the museum in Moscow and transfer all of its collections to the State Museum of the History of Religion in Leningrad, where they remain to this day.
Dr. Ekaterina Teryukova is currently an Associate Professor for Religious Studies at the Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia, and the Deputy-Director for Research Affairs in the State Museum of the History of Religion, Saint-Petersburg.
This research was funded by RFBR according to the project № 21-11-43036. It was principally based on the Scientific and Research Archive of the State Museum of the History of Religion (Materials from Fund #31, inventory #1).
