Metadata: State Museum of the Peoples of the USSR
Collection
- Country:
- Russia
- Holding institution:
- Russian Museum of Ethnography
- Holding institution (official language):
- Российский этнографический музей
- Postal address:
- Inzhenernaya St, 4/1, Sankt-Peterburg, Russia, 191011
- Phone number:
- (812) 313-45-74
- Web address:
- http://www.ethnomuseum.ru/
- Email:
- info@ethnomuseum.ru
- Reference number:
- Collection 8764
- Title:
- State Museum of the Peoples of the USSR
- Title (official language):
- Государственный музей народов СССР
- Creator/accumulator:
- State Museum of the Peoples of the USSR
- Date(s):
- 1860s/1930s
- Language:
- Russian
- Extent:
- approx. 20,000 storage units
- Type of material:
- Photographic images
- Scope and content:
- The collection contains documentary photographs of all ethnic groups of the Russian Empire and the USSR, showing views of cities and villages; the architecture of residential and public buildings; primary and secondary occupations; trades and crafts; family, public, and religious holidays and ceremonies; items of traditional cultures; anthropological “types”; national attire; and other phenomena of the cultural and everyday life of various ethnic groups. Photo-documents pertaining to Jewish history and culture that had belonged to the collection of the former Dashkov Museum may be provisionally divided into five thematic groups. 1) Four photographic portraits of Bukharan Jews – two women and two men, arranged on a single album sheet – taken from drawings by the artist V. V. Vereshchagin, who had been invited by K. P. von Kaufman, governor-general of Turkestan, to create the album Turkestan: Sketches from Nature by V. V. Vereshchagin (St. Petersburg, 1874), devoted to the ethnography of Central Asia. 2) Three photographic portraits (waist-high) from the album Types of Nationalities of the Turkestan Territory, with the photographer’s annotations: “Rauka (Jewish woman),” “Mullah Iskhak (Jewish man),” and “Tillia-ai (Jewish woman)” (1872). 3) Photographic portraits of Bukharan Jews taken in the studio of the photographer V. F. Kozlovskii (the photographs bear the studio’s stamp), with the following captions: “Jewish man. 60 years old,” “Jewish man. 28 years old,” “Jewish woman. 31 years old” (1872). 4) A collection formerly belonging to Count I. I. Vorontsov-Dashkov that includes photographic portraits of Jews from Tashkent taken in the studio of the photographer N. V. Nekhoroshev (the photographs bear the studio’s stamp; 1871-72). 5) Photographs of Bukharan Jews taken by the photographer A. Engel and prepared in the photography studio of D. I. Ermakov, bearing the photographer’s credits and annotations; these show pupils at a Jewish school, a young man, and groups of Jewish adults and children of Bukhara (1890-1910).
- Archival history:
- The photo and negative fonds of the State Museum of Ethnography was first formed in the 1890s, virtually from the moment the Russian Museum was established. At present the fonds of the Russian Museum of Ethnography’s photo archive (the photo collection) includes approximately 180,000 storage units. It consists of photographs taken by museum staff during expeditions, as well as photographs acquired from private individuals and various organisations. The main criterion for the formation of particular collections is that the photographs in question belong to a particular collection creator. This is why photos in a given collection may be devoted to different subjects and reflect different ethnic cultures, and may have been taken at different times. In cases in which photos were acquired from collection creators secondarily, a new collection is formed with corresponding numbering. At the same time, in cases in which a large quantity of photographs that can be grouped by ethnic provenance was received from a collection creator at once, standalone collections are organised. Within collections, photographs have consecutive numbering, the sequence of which relates to ethnicity and subject (if the photographs feature several ethnic groups, then for each of these, photos are grouped by subject), or subject only (if the collection’s materials pertain to only one ethnic group). A given photo collection’s sequence number depends on the overall number of exhibit items (and of collections thereof) received by the museum, including material items, as the Russian Museum of Ethnography considers photographs to have the same status as any other ethnographic item.
- Administrative/biographical history:
- This was established in 1862 pursuant to the statute, approved by Emperor Alexander II, “on the Moscow public museum and the Rumiantsev Museum.” In 1921, the Rumiantsev Museum was reorganised as the State Central Museum of Ethnology; and in 1924, its fonds were supplemented with the collections of the Dashkov Ethnography Museum (founded in 1867). These included clothing and photo- and documentary materials of the First Moscow All-Russian Ethnographic Exhibition (1867), the All-Russian Polytechnic Exhibition (Moscow, 1872), and other exhibitions organised by the Imperial Society of Friends of the Natural Sciences, Anthropology, and Ethnography (IOLEAE), as well as exhibit items acquired during expeditions made by IOLEAE members and received from private individuals. Also transferred to the Central Museum of Ethnology were ethnographic materials from the All-Union Agriculture Exhibition in Moscow in 1923, as well as items that had been confiscated from palace collections and private individuals in the post-revolutionary period and housed in repositories of the State Museum Fund. The collection of the Central Museum of Ethnology was subsequently supplemented via the expedition and collection activities of its staff members. In 1934, the presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR decreed that the museum be reorganised as the Museum of the Peoples of the USSR (MN SSSR) of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. In 1948, the museum was reorganised once more, and collections of materials on the culture and everyday life of the peoples of the USSR and countries of the Soviet bloc were transferred to the State Museum of Ethnography. Documentary materials from the archive of the Museum of the Peoples of the USSR were acquired by the archive of the State Museum of Ethnography, and survived only in part.
- Access points: locations:
- Bukhara
- Central Asia
- Russia
- Turkestan
- USSR
- Access points: persons/families:
- Engel, A.
- Ermakov, D. I.
- Kozlovskii, V. F.
- Nekhoroshev, N. V.
- Vereshchagin, V. V.
- von Kaufman, K. P.
- Vorontsov-Dashkov, I. I.
- System of arrangement:
- The collection has no inventory; there is an overall list of photographs per the log of exhibit items received by the museum, and lists arranged by storage location (topographical maps); collection materials are grouped by ethnic or regional provenance.
- Finding aids:
- There are lists of photographs.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary