Vasily Alekseevich Pushkarev (1915–2002) was appointed director of the State Russian Museum in 1951, at the end of the Stalinist epoch, and removed in 1977, during the Brezhnev era of stagnation.
He provoked a wide range of reactions, but everyone agreed that he was “not that simple.” For Pushkarev, though, everything was relatively simple. His professional credo was very clearly “to collect and preserve.” He was very proud of his purchases, acquiring that which he considered important for the collection wherever he could: from artists’ heirs, from other Soviet museums, from foreign collectors. Pushkarev’s personal aesthetic code, “if you take the right road round, you can achieve anything,” served him well during many years of battling Soviet bureaucracy.
This is a book about Soviet museum culture, about meetings, sensational exhibitions, and “secret rooms” in the Russian Museum that Pushkarev spent almost 25 years filling with works by banned artists.
