The Kirov Museum

I found my new favourite part of town. On Petrogradsky Island (the big island just to the east of Vasilievsky where I live and have class) is an area centred on Kamennostrovsky Prospect became the fashionable place for the rich to live in the years leading up to World War One, creating the most amazing collection of super cool art nouveau buildings! It's really fantastic - the narrowness of the busy streets, the towering buildings with their graceful organic curves and art nouveau details. In my opinion so much more beautiful than most of the older neo-classical and baroque architecture you find around Petersburg.

In the middle of this art nouveau area is the S.M. Kirov Museum, dedicated to the popular Communist Party chief of the city Sergei Kirov, who was in power from 1926 until he was assassinated in 1934 by a lone gunman in a corridor of the city government building at Smolny. There's alot of speculation that the murder was arranged by Stalin himself, who perhaps saw a dangerous threat to his own power in the growing popularity of his charismatic colleague. Whatever the truth behind Kirov's murder, it had dire consequences for the whole Soviet Union. In the investigation into Kirov's murder, a "conspiracy" in the Communist Party itself was "uncovered", leading to a series of mass arrests, deportations, and executions, first in Leningrad (Petersburg's name under the Communists) and then across the Soviet Union as the hunt for traitors and enemies spread. Kirov's murder was the event that really sparked Stalin's bloody purges of the 1930s, in which he ruthlessly destroyed his enemies, both real and suspected, in the Party, government, army, and in all layers of Soviet society.

Ok, enough with the history lesson! Knowing the background info does make these museums and historical sites meaningful though, especially when all the signage is in Russian only, which really is the norm! The Museum consists of three parts, the first being the carefully preserved flat where Kirov spent his final years with his wife. The apartment was amazing - spacious rooms with high ceilings, hardwood floors, and rich furnishings that included a polar bear rug, a library of 20,000 books, all sorts of trophies from Kirov's hunting trips, and gifts from workers' organizations and factories to their boss everywhere. A very rich apartment, especially considering that most people at the time were often living without bare necessities and were encouraged to live simply as good Communist people should! In the dining room, Kirov often entertained leading Bolsheviks such as Voroshilov, Ordzhonikidze, and even Stalin himself on a number of occassions - it wasn't hard to imagine that sinister crowd, partying well into the night. On Kirov's nightstand stood an interesting piece of Soviet anti-religious propaganda - an egg-shaped radio of red plastic that the sign said was supposed to be mocking the traditional Easter eggs of the Orthodox Church!

The second part of the museum was dedicated to the life and accomplishments of Kirov. Like the apartment, it was apparent that this area had not changed since the days of the Soviet Union; propaganda paintings and photos of Kirov hung everywhere, accompanied by Lenin quotes and explanatory text, all in Russian of course! One of the nice old babushki insisted on walking me through the whole thing and explained everything to me when she saw me struggling reading the signs. Unfortunately, she could only speak Russian so I didnt understand a whole lot of what she said, but hey it's the thought that counts! It was interesting the reverence with which she spoke of Kirov. Despite the fact that he was a Stalinist croney with as much blood on his hands as the rest of them, he still retains some of his former popularity it seems, as you can tell by the huge number of streets, squares, palaces of culture, stadiums, and other buildings in town that are still named in his honour, although many of the old Soviet names were changed after 1991. The focal point of the museum was the set of clothes that Kirov was murdered in (complete with bullet hole and tear where the doctors tried to get at his heart to revive him as he died) hanging in reverence in a reconstruction of his office at the Smolny Institute. Well, usually hanging there.. it had been moved to some archive until December, darn!

Upstairs was the last part of the museum, an exhibition about childhood in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s that was a lot of fun: cool old kids' toys, scary Stalin posters for the kiddies to have on their schoolroom wall, and some very Soviet music playing to add to the atmosphere! One of my favourite things was a "Calendar of Revolutionary Names," a list of names invented by the Soviets after the Revolution for people to use instead of the traditional names like Pyotr, Ivan, Pavel that were associated with the saints or other elements of the backward and bourgeouis Russian past. They were hilarious and show the absurd Soviet love of abbreviations (remember 1984 with Minitru for the Ministry of Truth? Well here's were Orwell got it all). Imagine naming your child, for example:

Krarmiya (Krasnaya Armiya - Red Army)
Luidzhi (Lenin umer, no ideyi zhizye - Lenin had died, but his ideas live on)
Vil (Vladmir Ilyich Lenin)
Loriks (Lenin, October Revolution, Industrialization, collectivization, socialism)

All in all, a great little gem of a museum - well worth seeing, if you're ever in Petersburg! And for once, the babushki were very friendly too.