Where to look for museum collections that disappeared during the Russian occupation

 

"Guys, come and help," Alexander Tkachenko, at that time the Minister of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine, suddenly jumps out from behind the construction fence in front of the DW correspondent. Instead of answering journalists' questions, he undertakes to manage the unloading of an SUV parked on Sobornija Street in Kherson. On November 19, 2022, the minister brought six paintings by modern Ukrainian artists to the local art museum.

"This is our first gesture for recovery," thanks 72-year-old Alina Docenko, who herself returned to Kherson two days earlier. The director of the museum hugs Minister Tkachenko in the marble hall bathed in the November sun - on the ninth day after the liberation, electricity has not yet reached the regional center.

Ukrainian security service investigators search dark basements with flashlights. They interrogate the few employees who remained in the city after eight months of occupation and inspect the empty warehouses. The scale of the crime, which will have to be investigated in the coming years, is impressive - almost all works of art disappeared from the Kherson Art Museum named after Oleksiy Shovkunenko: thousands of paintings, icons, sculptures and samples of decorative ceramics.

 

Evacuation is easier to invent

 

It is no secret among the people of Kherson: the collection of the gallery, the exhibits of the local history museum, the state archive, monuments to Russian commanders and even the remains of the grave of Grigory Potemkin - the favorite of Empress Catherine II, to whom Russian historiography attributed the founding of the city - were taken by the occupying forces at the beginning of November 2022 . years. Representatives of the Russian occupation authorities explained it all as "evacuation", due to possible battles for the liberation of Kherson.

Ukrainian authorities took no such action at the start of the full-scale Russian invasion. "We should have had a state evacuation system," admits Tkachenko, as he walks from the art museum to the local history museum. "But on the 24th (February 2022) they were already shooting. It was too late for that, for anything."

 

Alina Docenko recounts the concerns of the first day of the war in a slightly different way:

"At an online meeting at lunchtime, Tkachenko asked me if I could organize the removal of exhibits somewhere in Lviv. But for this, 50 cars, loaders and security are needed. Where will I get them? And Russian planes are flying over the city. The regional administration is not nothing helped," says Docenko.

If it is impossible to carry out an evacuation, you can at least invent it, noted the director. The renovation of the museum, which began in the fall of 2021, helped to reconcile the occupiers. The director showed the neglected halls and assured them that the exhibits had been removed even before the renovation. Instead, paintings and sculptures were kept under lock and key in basement vaults.

The vaults were only opened in July, when the occupation administration appointed local singer Natalija Desjatova as the manager of the museum. Two and a half months before that, Alina Docenko left the city after being threatened for refusing to organize an exhibition by May 9.

"All that time, our colleagues ran after the occupiers, followed them to the museum and shouted: the collection is there, nothing was taken," swears Docenko, leading a DW correspondent through the now empty halls.

 

The extent of the robbery

 

Almost 15 months after these events, Docenko recounts the story of the occupation of the museum in the same emotional and detailed manner, speaking in front of several hundred policemen, diplomats and international lawyers. At the conference in Kiev, the investigation of the crimes of the Russian occupiers against the cultural heritage, the fight against the smuggling of artistic values and the ways of their return are discussed.

During the invasion, more than 40 museums were looted in the territories occupied by Russia, reports Oleksiy Komenko, the first deputy chief prosecutor of Ukraine. However, the estimated losses of museum treasures are not final, adds Jevhen Rusinov, deputy head of the main investigation department of the SBU.

 

"These actions can take years," says Rusinov.

Comparing the descriptions of the museum exhibits to what remains, the Kherson art gallery is missing almost 11,000 works of art - more than three-quarters of the collection. Docenkova fights for everything: Ivan Aivazovsky's three marines and the 17th-century "Portrait of a Lady with a Dog" by the British Peter Lely, and a selection of Soviet paintings that she herself collected in the 1970s. At the conference, she shows photos of blue Kamaz vehicles with the emblem of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the Russian Federation, on which the exhibits were taken out of the city in October-November 2022 - as

it soon turned out, to the Tavrida Central Museum in Simferopol, which was occupied in 2014. years.

"Caring people sent me a video of our collection being unloaded - that's how we started to recognize our works," says the director.

Since then, employees of the art museum have been searching for individual works in pictures published on social networks and through stories published on Russian television. As of March 2024, only 94 artworks have been identified by inventory numbers and image fragments. In what condition it is and where everything else is - they don't know for sure.

 

Crimean hospitality

"The paintings are in safe hands," assures the Russian media Andriy Malgin, who has been managing the Tavrida Central Museum since 2000. He was allegedly asked by the so-called Russian "Ministry of Culture" of the Kherson region to accept exhibits from the Kherson gallery in the fall of 2022. However, the "temporary storage agreement" of the entire collection or parts of it was concluded for only five months. In addition, Russian officials and Malgin himself usually mention "about 10,000 works", not about 11,000, which are considered missing in Kherson. DW managed to contact Malgin: he attributes such disagreements to "rounding up".

"I didn't list all the pictures, I didn't look at them and I didn't take them into account," Malgin insists.

However, Natalija Desyatova, whom the occupiers put in charge of the gallery, in a comment for "Mediazone" mentioned something else: before Malgina's arrival in Kherson, she did not understand how to carry out the order of the head of the administration Volodymyr Saldo about "evacuation" and "she had already started to provoke anger". . After the "evacuation" of the Kherson Art Museum to occupied Henichesk, it still does not have its premises or even a computer and simply cannot keep records of the collection, Desjatova admitted.

In March, the Kherson City Court will try her in absentia for collaborationism. Interviews with Russian media and the organization of exhibitions were characterized by SBU investigators as one of the most serious manifestations - "informative activities aimed at supporting the aggressor", for which a prison sentence of 10 to 12 years is threatened.

 

The most valuable and important

 

Tetyana Bratchenko, who has managed the Kherson Museum of Local History since 1997, is also being tried in absentia in Kyiv on the same charges. The seventy-four-year-old director started cooperating with the occupiers almost from the very beginning.

 "Colleagues first called her and said that maybe we could hide the exhibits somewhere? Tetjana Hrihorivna answered: there is no need. And on Museum Day (May 18), she gathered everyone, congratulated and announced that we are now cooperating with the Russians. I didn't agree and I was fired," museum secretary Elena Eremenko recalled in November 2022.

The current head of the Museum of Local History in Kherson, Olga Goncharova, complains that the Russians took away not only the most valuable of the 180,000 pieces - ancient Greek amphorae, gold ornaments of steppe nomads, medieval weapons and Orthodox icons, but also the most important ones. After the departure of the Russians, no lists of exhibits and museum documentation confirming their historical value were found. It is estimated that around 23,000 items were stolen.

 

Some of them, together with the pro-Russian leadership, ended up in occupied Geničesk, some are kept in the Sevastopol museum "Khersones Tavrijski". But no one can say for sure whether some samples got "lost" on the way.

"Something was not conveyed by vans: FSB officers put them in the cars in which they arrived," guard Anatoly Matviyenko recalled in an interview with the online publication Babel.

 

There is even less information about the fate of collections from the still occupied territories. According to Ukrainian museum workers and Russian media, the Russians also "evacuated" Novokakhov museums and galleries in November 2022, although it is not known exactly where. The Zaporizhia "Stone Tomb" was near the "Tavrsky Chersonese", and at least one Paleolithic exposure was taken to Sevastopol. All museums in Mariupol were destroyed during the siege of the city. As Russian media reported back in April 2022, the director of the Mariupol Native Museum, Natalia Kapushnikova, managed to save only a dozen works of art - including three paintings by local master Arkhip Kujindzhi and one by Aivazovsky. However, she handed them all over to the Russians, who took the works to the Donetsk Local Museum.

 

Property of the community or property of the people?

 

Archaeological collections are increasingly stolen during museum thefts - they make up a significant part of the holdings, are easily transported and are in demand among collectors, says the head of Ukraine's UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Harshet Virk. The so-called "Scythian treasures" - jewelry, weapons and other artifacts of the ancient nomads of the northern Black Sea - are perhaps the most popular "cultural" contraband from Ukraine, located by law enforcement officers in Europe and the United States. "However, not all of the missing museum collections in Interpol's database are missing," Virk told a law enforcement conference.

In the past 10 years, Ukrainian police officers have publicly declared only one collection - about fifty works by Russian artists of the 18th and 19th centuries - which the Prosecutor's Office estimated at 1.3 million dollars. In February 2014, they were transferred from the Simferopol Art Gallery to the exhibition in the Mariupol Kujindzhi Museum.

 

But with the beginning of the occupation of the peninsula, Crimean museum workers demanded the paintings back. Already after the "referendum" a group of retired special forces "returned" the paintings to Simferopol. The local court found two employees of the museum in Mariupol guilty of official negligence during the transfer of the collection to the occupied territories, but immediately amnestied them.

Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, the SBU has been investigating the removal of museum collections as a violation of the laws and customs of war, as well as an element of alleged genocide against the Ukrainian people. Official suspicions in such cases have not yet been communicated to anyone.

"I can't say with certainty that we know everything about this network of removing museum valuables", admits Yevhen Rusinov from the SBU's main investigative department. - However, we know that the high leaders of Russia also included military personnel who were entrusted with it in this process.

Last year, Natalia Desyatova, Tetyana Bratchenko and Andrey Malgin were included in the sanctions lists of Ukraine, the EU, the USA and a number of other countries for the theft of museum values. DW was unable to contact the two women from Kherson through known contacts. Malgin claims that he did not steal anything.

The removal of exhibits is justified by the norms of the Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property from Armed Conflict - and orders the removal of art objects and other artifacts from the war zone.

 

"The collection of the art museum still belongs to the Kherson Oblast community and we will definitely return it when it is safe," promises Malgin.

He refused to answer the question to which country, in his opinion, "Kherson Oblast" belongs.

Historian Denis Jashni from the Kyiv non-governmental organization "Crimean Institute for Strategic Studies" calls the museum curator's arguments "false and cynical" and recalls that he already resorted to them in a legal dispute over the "Scythian gold" exhibition, the return of which he demanded from the Allard Pearson museum in Amsterdam to the occupied peninsula. "But museum funds belong to the entire people of Ukraine, not to residents of certain districts. Museums only preserve, exhibit and study collections," Yashny explains.

He draws attention to the fact that the Central Museum of Tavrida and other institutions of Crimea long ago included their collections in the state catalog of museum funds of the Russian Federation. And this is a direct change of ownership, a violation of the same Hague Convention. According to a Russian law adopted last year, museums in the "new territories" must do so by the end of 2027.

Ukraine's Ministry of Culture and Information Policy, which has not yet launched such a single register, is in a hurry to do so by the end of this year. It is promised to include all available information about the collections left in the occupied territories - this should help in the return of valuables, which, however, seems possible only after the end of the war.