Window on Eurasia

Moscow’s Plan to Close Religions Museum Angers Muslims

Paul Goble

Vienna, June 30, 2006 – Moscow’s announced plans to eliminate the Museum of History of Religions in St. Petersburg by combining it with Russian Ethnographic Museum there into a single Museum of Civilizations will destroy a unique institution and work against the interests of Russia’s Muslims, a leading Muslim broadcaster says.

In an article posted online this week, Dzhannat Markus says that this
plan, announced by Mikhail Shvydkoi, who heads the Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography, is something that should as a result be opposed by all Muslims in the Russian Federation
[http://www.islam.ru/culture/uisre/?print_page].

Shvydkoi’s plan has already drawn fire from employees of the museum, who are upset that the decision was taken without consultation, and by the Union of Museums of Russia, which says that the failure to have a discussion “creates the impression that [the decision] is only a cover for the carrying out of other intentions.”

The Museum of the History of Religions was created in 1932 by the great
Russian ethnographer and linguist Vladimir Bogoraz-Tan and contains an
enormous collection of exhibits on all the religions of the world but
especially those found in the Russian Federation and other former
Soviet republics.

Until recently, it was housed in the northern capital’s Kazan Cathedral, but the museum now has its own home on Pochtamt Street. And its employees had been looking forward to 2007 when the museum, the oldest of its kind in the world, would mark its 75th anniversary.

Beginning in 1954 and until almost the end of the Soviet period, the
museum was a center of anti-religious activities, but despite that, its
exhibits about Russian Orthodoxy, Islam, and Buddhism provided one of the few places in the Soviet Union where people could see first hand materials about their own faiths and those of others, Markus argues.

That possibility, despite the intentions of Soviet officials, had the effect of helping to promote inter-religious understanding, he says, something the museum, its exhibits and its staff have made an even greater contribution now that the anti-religious component has been dropped.

Obviously, ethnography and religious studies are “close,” Markus says. But they are not the same, and combining the two museums as Shvydkoi plans will simultaneously reduce the effectiveness of the mission of each and constitute “an attack on the culture of museum work in Russia.”

For Muslims, the Muslim broadcaster says, this is an especially dangerous attack because in the current climate, “citizens of Russia ought to have at least one place – the Museum of the History of Religion – where people will be able to see the traditions of one another. To discuss, to argue, and to consul.”

Consequently, he argued, the Muslim communities of the Russian Federation should add their voice to that of the Union of Museums and demand the preservation of this “unique” facility and its vitally important work.