Revolting or Not, It's a Good Show

On a Tuesday morning, the Museum of the Revolution is quiet as a tomb, and the tour guides pace back and forth before glass cases.


One man strides in and pauses before a light fixture, melted into folds like ribbon candy during the 1993 hard-line rebel attack on Ostankino. An amateur historian? No -- he works there. Another man ventures in tentatively. An inquisitive passerby? No -- it's Vil Mirzayanov, coming to donate his slippers from prison.


The dissident chemist, free after being imprisoned last year for publishing state secrets, signed the release form for his files and took his first look around the place. "If my things are interesting to anyone, why not?" he said, smiling. "No one else has asked for them."


Not to worry. The permanent collection of the Museum of the Revolution is interested. In the museum's new wing on Ulitsa Mokhovaya, the glass cases are opened with some frequency, and the word "revolution" is defined loosely.


"What is revolution? Only revolt?" asked Vitaly Vasilkov, an assistant director, who helps cull potential exhibits. "We have a very wide interpretation of our duty. But how can you sum up modern life? The whole thing is problematic.


"It takes a great deal of bravery to fill an exhibit about current affairs," he added. "For instance, we like to collect furniture. What furniture best symbolizes the modern era? I can do that for the 19th century, but I would have trouble with the modern era."


Accordingly, the associates are gathering materials like magpies. By comparison with the Ulitsa Tverskaya wing -- where young men in shirtsleeves gaze out of daguerreotypes -- the Mokhovaya wing has had to make judgment calls. The museum "would not rule out" an exhibit of prominent businessmen, Vasilkov said.


Vladimir Zhirinovsky was helpful enough to donate his hat along with 59 other personal items.


Irina Zakharova, who directs the museum's current-events exhibit, is hoping to get ahold of a CNN baseball cap, in recognition of the news agency's role in the October 1993 crisis.


And the personal papers of Sergei Mavrodi, mastermind of the MMM pyramid investment scheme, are on their way. "We don't consider him to be a political figure, not yet," Zakharova said. "We consider him a fact of our lives."


Since opening the modern wing in 1989, Zakharova has spent most of her time scavenging for facts of our lives. The day after federal forces bombed the White House in 1993, she applied for permission to gather items for her archives. The prosecutor wouldn't let her. But within 10 days she was on the scene, taking a bullet-holed door off its hinges and pocketing a shattered telephone. For a current-events archivist in Russia, some weeks are like that.


"We are constantly collecting things. It all depends on the political situation," she said. "Sometimes we are more busy than others."


When her thoughts wander to the Tverskaya wing, which only covers revolutions up to 1991, Zakharova gets a little wistful. Now, with the number of political parties proliferating daily, the pace of revolution is apt to give her an ulcer. "Our work has become so complicated," she said. "We don't have room for the Vodka Lovers' Party and things like that." What with former mayor Gavriil Popov's trademark pullover sitting in the storeroom, and tectonic social change cropping up all over, the curator barely has time to catch her breath. And time is only the tip of the iceberg.


"Finding space," Zakharova sighed, "is our single biggest problem."





The permanent collection of the Museum of the Revolution is located at 13 Ulitsa Mokhovaya, and is open daily except Monday from 10 A.M. until 5:30 P.M., and 11 A.M. to 7 P.M. on Saturday. Tel. 202-0367. Nearest metro: Borovitskaya.