Exhibition Activities of the Pavlovsk Palace and Park Ensemble in the 1950s

During the period of active post-war restoration of the palace and park ensembles of Leningrad, in the absence of permanent expositions, exhibitions were one of the few ways of museum communication. The article focuses on the exhibitions of the Pavlovsk Palace Museum and Park in the 1950s. As a research base, the author uses articles from the newspaper “Vperyod” issued in the city of Pushkin, and unpublished materials of the Central State Archive of Literature and Art of St. Petersburg: reports and plans of the directorate, programs of festive events, minutes of the scientific department employees’ meetings, financial reports of the 1950s, etc.

On the example of Pavlovsk, the article reveals the essence of exhibitions as a typical phenomenon for a museum complex, as well as for a culture and recreation park, which allowed forming civic consciousness and implementing state cultural policy. The exhibitions helped to solve a set of political, educational, personality-developing, leisure, and cultural tasks of Soviet cultural institutions.

The author conducts a comparative quantitative analysis of the total number of exhibitions by year. Based on the content of the exhibitions, there is provided a universal thematic classification. The article shows the connection of the disclosed topics and the number of exhibitions with the cultural and political situation in the country during that period. There is determined the organizational specifics of the process, within which the main sites, time and forms of exhibitions are identified.

The article concludes that most of the exhibitions did not correspond to the museum’s essence, but those that related directly to the history of the museum and its collections were in tourist demand. Some of the exhibitions of the museum profile, over time, determined the content of the future permanent expositions of the State Museum-Reserve “Pavlovsk”. The emergence and growth of such exhibitions, covered in the media, contributed to the activation of visitor interest in Pavlovsk as a museum and the development of cultural tourism, primarily at the local and regional level.

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