Guiding Lines: Cultural Pensioners

And that’s not even mentioning items from the Hermitage used by guests at the wedding of Leonid Brezhnev’s daughter to the future deputy minister of internal affairs Yury Churbanov.

The question is why aren’t legislators doing anything to enable these museums to support themselves and function properly without help from the budget or charity from those who want to be surrounded by pictures of Roerich and Rembrandt when drinking champagne?

The answer is simple: a conflict of priorities. Each department has its interests. And let the next generation care about their future themselves. As Sergey Lukyanenko wrote, "to the question about children, he drily answered: he is not familiar".

And so the race for survival for the director begins. Here you have a museum, and there you have a business, which, by the way, is on state premises. And therefore pay taxes like all businessmen are obliged, the tax inspector says; and this is echoed by an official from the regional management of culture or the property committee who says the rental rate should be increased. The fact that a museum makes money to preserve monuments of culture - whether they be pictures, sculptures, antiques - nobody cares: that is the law. But what is its sentiment?

Publishers, who have developed business in "the country with the most readers" are in a good position. Commercial book shops (although some have already started having problems - the income of a cosmetics boutique in a shopping center as a tenant is often higher) and a chain of distributors – are for their service. But don’t mock it: in a library the volumes of B. Akunin, the Strugatsky brothers and Maria Semenova are usually kept next to Confuscious and Nietzsche, Feodor Dostoevsky, Andrei Voznesensky and Charles Bodler, Maurice Druon, William Shakespeare and Dante Alighieri. Bibliomaniacs in our country are not a rarity these days. I am one of them.

But the love of literature is the same part of culture as all other kinds of art: painting, sculpture, music, theatre, cinema, architecture, interior design. And although publishing houses and film companies feel rather comfortable, what will happen if the novels of the Strugatsky brothers are changed for the works of one-time visionaries, and Andrey Tarkovsky and Mark Zakharov will be completely pushed off our screens by homebred, not even bought, series?

What will happen if skyscrapers become a symbol of Moscow (and God forbid, of St. Petersburg), and old buildings will continue to decay to the point of demolition? (Pilots have a phrase for this: it is the moment when during taking off it is too late to stop. You either have to take off or crash off the runway).

And what will "pensioners" of real estate do? What will happen to monuments of architecture? Nobody will fix their windows or wash marks off their walls for free, they won’t wash an ancient entrance, they won’t restore anything..... Shall we hope for the help and influence of the West like what already happened in Soviet and Russian history? It also isn’t that simple. In Soviet times UNESCO refused to include the Kremlin in the list of most protected historical monuments of the world. And this wasn’t just based on political reasons. The main reason was the Palace of Congresses, built only for political reasons, irreversibly spoiled the view of the Kremlin. And in fact UNESCO allocates rather large funds for the maintenance of monuments.

It has seemed that help is not necessary. They have decided to manage it without help. And for the reconstruction of the Metropol hotel during Soviet years the best forces in the form of Finnish contractors were used to prove that we can take care of our cultural heritage. There was only one problem – the Finns were used to working without any delayed deadlines. But drawings and schedules were drawn by Soviet designers. And when the papers reached the appropriate channels, they suddenly realised that the main internal water pipe was planned to be laid in the center of Mikhail Vrubel’s murial painting on the walls of the Metropol hotel. This was discovered three days after the start of the work. Everyone was upset, even the Finns who did nothing wrong.

As always, there are many more questions than answers.