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Presidium Session of the Museum Council of Russia in Vyoshenskaya

An extended session of the Presidium of the Museum Council of Russia took place in Stanitsa Vyoshenskaya, on September, 15-16. Directors of 50 major museums of Russia from Karelia to the Far East gathered to discuss current problems and development prospects of the museums.

The location of the meeting was not accidental: the Sholokhov Museum-Reserve is known in Russia and abroad to be one of the most dynamically developing museums and a recognized leader in the museum community. Introducing the Museum-Reserve development concept ”Open Air Novel” director A.M. Sholokhov underlined the main feature: the Sholokhov land itself inspires the Museum with life, where the exhibits and expositions are villages and stanitsas, natural sights, and the visitors get a unique opportunity to go through the roads of the personages from the novel “The Quiet Don” and other works of the writer.

The extended session of the Presidium of the Museum Council of Russia held in the “People’s House” was joined by the RF Presidential Adviser on Culture V.I. Tolstoy; Chairman of the Commission on Culture and Conservation of the Historical and Cultural Heritage of the Russian Federation Public Chamber P.A. Pozhigailo; the head of the museum fund sector of the Cultural Heritage Department of the RF Ministry of Culture, V.N. Fomin.

The session was conducted by the president of the Museum Council of Russia M.B. Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage. He informed about implementation of orders of the President of the Russian Federation according to the results of the meeting with the museum public in Saratov, on April, 5, 2012, about the most important tasks facing the museums, about the challenges to be addressed by each museum in particular and all the museum community as a whole.

The members of the meeting spoke about protection of the memorial landscape zones, identified the problems arising from the interaction with the public authorities, discussed the issues of financing museums, museum staff salary increases, proposed to introduce a number of amendments to the draft of the federal law “About Culture”.

A great attention was paid to the issues of innovations in the museum practice, their harmony with the activities involving a direct human contact with the historical and cultural artifacts. Undoubtedly, media technologies should be widely used, virtual museums should be created to serve another instrument of interaction with the visitors, to assemble the information, which can’t be shown in expositions, to assist in the museum work. But it is inadmissible to repurpose museum objects, to close traditional museums replacing them by virtual ones.

The speakers proposed the cultural development to be one of the  national projects, to provide targeted funding for creation a mobile museum fund to maximize the access of the population to culture, to ensure the quality indicators in the overall assessment of the museum work effectiveness to have significantly greater value, than those of the quantity ones, to develop professional standards for the museum staff and to define the criteria for assessing the effectiveness of certain categories of the Museum staff. These and other proposals will form the basis of the Concept of the Museum Development in the Russian Federation, which the RF President V.V. Putin instructed to carry out in 2012. The Presidium of the Museum Council of  Russia considers, that this Concept must embrace all the main approaches to the museum as a special kind of institution, become a strategic, quite a new in approaches document, but not merely a verbal justification of the budgetary financing for the next 10 years. The Conception thereafter can be incorporated into the draft of the federal law “About Culture”.

On the results of the extended session of the Museum Council Presidium of Russia a number of resolutions were adopted and will be published on our website.

The members of the forum learned about the work of the Museum-Reserve of M.A. Sholokhov, visited the museum depository, the Estate of M.A. Sholokhov, a historical-literary exposition “M.A. Sholokhov. Time and Destiny”, exhibitions in the Excursion-Exhibition Centre “The People’s House”, went sightseeing about Stanitsa Vyoshenskaya and the River Don.

In Kruzhilin Village the guests visited the house, where M.A. Sholokhov was born, the house of his parents, a Cossack farmstead showing a Cossack everyday life in the Upper Don Region late in the XIX – early in the XX centuries, took part in the “Cossack Gathering”: The Sholokhov Museum workers invited their colleagues for taking part in ploughing, sowing, mowing, haymaking to follow with the Don Cossack dinner.

The museum forum went on in Azov and Rostov, where the session members visited the Azov Museum-Reserve, the Rostov Regional Local Lore Museum and the Fine Art Museum, held a press-conference for the mass media. M.B. Piotrovsky and the Rostov Region governor V.Y. Golubev discussed the prospects of museum development, the possibility of establishing restoration schools in the Don region – in the Azov Museum (metal objects) and in the Museum of M.A. Sholokhov (paper rarities).

The aim of the museum workers of Russia is to establish a united museum space of Russia, to ensure a free access of the public to culture. After all, M.B. Piotrovsky stressed, that “the museum quality determines the quality of the nation”, and this quality must be the highest.

Tatiyana Nektova