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# A Gift for Stalin
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/podarok-stalinu/
- Published: 2024-11-08T09:55:56.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:32:12.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Art, Moscow, Museums, Society

The Pushkin Museum has put on display an art cabinet (a so-called kunstkast) presented to Stalin in 1949\. This year, specialists of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts attributed this piece of furniture: the paintings are by the Antwerp painter Jan van Bal­en and date from the middle of the seventeenth century. The doors and the fronts of the drawers of the cabinet depict scenes from Ovid's *Metamorphoses*.

In 1949 the Pushkin Museum became the venue for an exhibition of gifts to Joseph Stalin on his seventieth birthday. As a result, it was not only the decoration of the halls that changed but also the make-up of the museum's staff: dozens of employees were dismissed, having failed vetting by the state security organs. On show were busts of the leader in every conceivable material, from stone to anthracite, carpets bearing his face, portraits of Stalin on grains of rice, furniture, banners, tableware, souvenirs, motorcycles, pneumatic drills and even edible gifts. The exhibition ran for an extraordinarily long time, outliving Stalin himself. It was dismantled only in the summer of 1953.

Some of Stalin's gifts remained in the museum's storerooms; the rest were dispersed among other museums or disposed of.