Metadata: Ethnography Department of the Russian Museum
Collection
- Country:
- Russia
- Holding institution:
- Russian Museum of Ethnography
- Holding institution (official language):
- Российский этнографический музей
- Postal address:
- 191186, Россия, Санкт-Петербург, Инженерная ул., 4/1
- Phone number:
- (812) 313-45-74
- Web address:
- http://www.ethnomuseum.ru/
- Email:
- info@ethnomuseum.ru
- Reference number:
- F. 1
- Title:
- Ethnography Department of the Russian Museum
- Title (official language):
- Этнографический отдел Русского музея
- Creator/accumulator:
- Ethnography Department of the Russian Museum
- Date(s):
- 1819/1929
- Language:
- Russian
- English
- German
- Extent:
- 980 storage units
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Scope and content:
-
Housed in op. 1 are materials distributed into two sections: “Office” [Kantseliariia] and “Council of the Ethnography Department.”
The first section includes documents pertaining to the museum’s administrative, financial, and business operations; organisational work on its collections; plans and reports on operations of the Ethnography Department; minutes of meetings and sessions of the department’s directors and staff; correspondence with other museums and various organisations on exhibition projects, and on providing photographs and illustrative materials for research or publishing purposes; correspondence with the Ethnography Department’s correspondents on acquiring ethnographic items and shipping them to St. Petersburg; and correspondence with department staff members engaged in ethnographic research trips (1873-1917). The second section contains logs of meetings of the department council (1902-29).
Materials pertaining to the history of Jews in Russia include the publication Report of the Ethnography Department of the Emperor Alexander III Russian Museum for 1909 (St. Petersburg, 1910), in which, along with information on the department’s staff and its financial and collection activities, brief reports are given by staff members (curator-ethnographers, as they were referred to in the organisational chart of the period) regarding expeditions to the particular regions in the current year. These include a report on A. A. Miller’s trip to northern Azerbaijan and, in particular, to the Mountain Jews of Quba (Baku province).
The section of the report titled “Donations received in 1909” mentions “Karaite items transferred by Mrs. Bobovich.” There are also reports by A. K. Serzhputovskii on the ethnography of Tatars, Belorussians, and Jews (1917-29), etc.
Op. 2 includes documents on the history of how the museum collections were formed; correspondence with museum collectors and correspondents; scholarly reports on expeditions and trips; articles and essays on ethnography; bibliographic records; etc. In particular, this inventory houses materials of the following museum staff members: correspondence of K. Z. Kavtaradze on the collection of ethnographic records pertaining to Tatars, Georgians, and Jews in Georgia; forms for item lists that were to accompany any shipment of materials acquired for the department, including a listing of a collection assembled in the city of Derbent (Dagestan region) and consisting of 28 items acquired from Jews of that city (1916-17); letters from A. A. Miller on collecting materials on the ethnography of Gypsies, Karaites, and Tatars of the Tavriia province, and in particular, among Karaites of the city of Evpatoriia (1906-13), and other peoples of the Caucasus in the Kutais (Kutaisi) and Baku provinces, including lists of items acquired; letters and reports by A. K. Serzhputovskii on expeditions and items acquired, including a report on a trip in the summer of 1923 to the Minsk province that contains information on the everyday life of local Jews, and a listing of the collection of photographs taken by Serzhputovskii on behalf of the Ethnography Department of the Russian Museum that record “Jewish types” of Slutsk county (Minsk province); views of the “synagogue-shul,” “public bath” (mikvah), etc.; correspondence on the acquisition from Iu. Iu. Pavlovich of six watercolour renderings of Jewish men’s attire in the Kiev province (1911); an inventory of documents in a Tul’chin archive compiled by I. P. Sakharov on behalf of the Commission for the Analysis of Antique Documents that mentions, in particular, a “privilege” (a legislative act in the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania) granted to the Jews of Lutsk, a corresponding excerpt from the lustration books [logs of the lustracja, state property appraisal for tax purposes] of 1554, etc.
Also housed in op. 2 are “Questionnaires on the Ethnography of Krymchaks”; these were survey forms of the 1913 census, conducted (with the permission of the governor-general of the Tavriia province) by personnel of Krymchak communities in nineteen settlements: Armiansk, Alupka, Balaklava, Bakhchisarai, Berdiansk, Genichesk, Dzhankoi, Evpatoriia, Karasubazar, Kerch’, Lugansk, Mariupol’, Novorossiisk, Odessa, Sevastopol, Staryi Krym, Sukhum-Kale, Feodosiia, and Yalta. Each questionnaire is designed to be filled in with information about a particular family, including children up to sixteen years (for children over sixteen, a separate survey sheet was completed), and contains approximately fifty questions concerning the age of the interviewees, their marital and social status, property status, sphere of professional activity, educational and cultural level, state of health, and housing conditions. Several of the questions were aimed at gathering information on Krymchak history, and in particular, it was asked whether the family was in possession of antique manuscripts or items; or could relate any folk or family legends concerning the origin of the Krymchaks. The survey forms were transferred in 1940 by I. S. Kaia, a Krymchak educator and regional historian who was one of the organisers of this census.
- Administrative/biographical history:
- This was formed at the Emperor Alexander III Russian Museum on 10 January 1902, when Emperor Nicholas II approved the department’s staff, and funding was organised for its operations. The department was housed in a new building constructed by the architect V. F. Svin’in. The Ethnography Department was to “present the picture of the ethnographic expanse of our fatherland, a picture of the peoples inhabiting Russia and the immediate vicinity thereof,” as well as to “serve the purpose of general education through the visual survey of collected items.” These tasks were to be implemented via the acquisition and preservation of authentic monuments of material and religious folk culture and the construction of museum exhibits. Items acquired for the museum’s collections came primarily from the collection work performed during ethnographic expeditions. Concurrently with the acquisition of material collections, photo- and documentary collections were assembled. Taking part in this collection work in the first decades of the department’s existence were not just museum staff members, who were few in number; specialists and volunteer correspondents were also recruited from all corners of the Russian Empire – teachers, zemstvo doctors, students, representatives of the merchant class and clergy, military personnel, diplomats, officials, and so on. The department’s work consisted of the registration and inventory of both new arrivals and previously acquired items, and compiling lists of collections for publication. The department council considered it most convenient to divide the exhibit-item coverage territory into four regions, so as to facilitate oversight of the formation, organisation and inventory of collections. Until 1909, these were: a) Siberia and the Far East, b) northern Russia, c) central and southern Russia, d) the Caucasus and Central Asia. In 1910, the composition of the regions b and c was reorganised, the former to include northern and central Russia, the latter, southern and western Russia. In general, materials on Jewish ethnography were collected from the regions of the Caucasus and Central Asia and northern and central Russia. The ethnographic exhibits were first opened to the public on 3 June 1923. By order no. 211 of the people’s commissar of education of the RSFSR (13 March 1934), the Ethnography Department was removed from the Russian Museum and given independent status as the State Museum of Ethnography (GME).
- Access points: locations:
- Alupka
- Armiansk
- Azerbaijan
- Bakhchisarai
- Balaklava
- Berdiansk
- Caucasus
- Derbent
- Dzhankoi
- Evpatoriia
- Feodosiia
- Genichesk
- Karasubazar
- Kerch’
- Kiev province
- Kutais province
- Lithuania
- Lugansk
- Lutsk
- Minsk province
- Mountain Jews of Quba
- Odessa
- Poland
- Russia
- Sevastopol
- Slutsk county
- St Petersburg
- Staryi Krym
- Sukhum-Kale
- Tul’chin
- Yalta
- Access points: persons/families:
- Bobovich
- K. Z. Kavtaradze
- Kaia, I.
- Miller, A. A.
- Pavlovich, Iu. Iu.
- Sakharov, I. P.
- Serzhputovskii, A. K.
- System of arrangement:
- The fonds includes two inventories systematised according to the chronological-structural principle, and chronologically.
- Finding aids:
- Inventories are available.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary
