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# The Evacuation of Museum Collections from the Western Regions of the USSR Began in the First Days of the Great Patriotic War
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/evakuatsiia-muzeinykh-kollektsii-iz-zapadnykh-regionov-sssr-nachalas-s-pervykh-dnei-velikoi-otechestvennoi-voiny/
- Published: 2025-06-21T18:01:31.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:29:41.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Moscow, Museums, Heritage

The evacuation of museum collections from the western regions of the USSR began in the first days of the Great Patriotic War. The rapidity of the advance and the appalling scenes of destruction visited by the Germans upon monuments of history and culture left no other choice. The museums had to be put on rails at once and dispatched to the interior of the country. Packing, transporting and preserving museum treasures demanded immense labour, devotion and, at times, heroism from museum staff: from art historians and scientific secretaries to keepers, attendants and young specialists, who worked round the clock in the harsh conditions of approaching hostilities, wartime confusion and shortages.

Since May the Pushkin Museum has been showing an exhibition devoted to the feat of the staff of the State Museum of Fine Arts, and to the way museum workers, beneath a shattered glass skylight, saved paintings, sculpture, furniture and the galleries themselves. The exhibition is a chronicle of museum life in the war years and contains detailed photographic documentation, together with extracts from the memoirs and letters of the museum workers who rescued ancient vases, statues and canvases by great masters. Principal attention is given to the photographs of Nikolai Svishchov-Paola, whose lens captured the ruined galleries, the work of the restorers and the first exhibitions after the war.

The first part of the exhibition is devoted to the rescue of the collections at the outbreak of war, when more than 100,000 objects were taken to Novosibirsk and Solikamsk, while the portion of the collection that could not be transported was hidden in cellars. The second section tells of the life of the museum during the war years: its scholarly work, its lectures and even its children's matinees. The third part of the exhibition sheds light on the damage the museum suffered during the bombing raids and on its subsequent revival: the collections began to return to Moscow in 1944

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