European Museums, a Look from the USSR and the Limits of Transnationality in the Mid-1920th

The article, in the conceptual framework proposed by transnational history as a methodological approach, analyzes materials related to the reception of Western European museums by Soviet museum workers of the 1920th. The objects of analysis are the reports of O. F. Waldhauer and A. A. Pochinkov on innovations in museum work in Germany and Italy, which were made at a meeting of the Museum section of the State Institute of Art History (Leningrad) in 1925. Based on the idea of the importance of the «close inspections of the “Other”» mechanism for the realization of “links and flows” of transnational history, the author shows what the authors of the reports under review saw exactly. Contextualization of the material in the situation of Soviet museum field in the mid-1920th suggests that their view was largely selective. One of its main tasks was to legitimize their own searches and approaches, which needed support in the face of the state authorities and part of the professional community. No less important was the perception of what was seen as a place of memory, referring to memories and partially compensating for the loss / absence of social capital in the present. The author comes to the conclusion that the "gaze" directed from Soviet Russia at European museums was largely determined by the task of ensuring the interests of the viewer himself. The selectivity of what was seen, which probably had an implicit character and was not always realized by the "observers "themselves, corrected the final"connections and flows". The sensitive component of "peering" was also important, which actualized the emotions and memories of the viewer, bringing to the fore the potential of what was seen as a kind of place of memory. The transformations associated with the process of reception and recoding should be taken into account when analyzing the transnational dimension of any historical phenomenon, including Museum business

Political science · Transnationality · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · Law · Museums and Cultural Heritage · Soviet and Russian History