Urban women’s clothing in the USSR, 19030s.
Photo: Ekaterina BARANOVA
The play “The Sailor’s Silence” based on the work of Alexander Galich is the history of our country in the complex and contradictory era of the 1930s-1940s.
“It reminds us that we live in the greatest country and, no matter what happens, we must be with our country, live here and die here,” said Vladimir Mashkov, artistic director of the Oleg Tabakov Theater, at the opening of the exhibition. .
The exhibition includes objects from the museum’s collections, complemented by accessories from the Oleg Tabakov Theater. These are photographs, documents, paintings, posters, costumes that reflect the lives of people in the first half of the 20th century. You can “visit” Jewish shtetls, feel the spirit of the times of the New Economic Policy, the period of mass repressions, the era of industrialization and collectivization and the Great Patriotic War. Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky and Alexander Galich performed by artists of the Oleg Tabakov Theater will fill visitors with emotion and help them understand the era.
The panel with the coat of arms of the USSR is a gift from IV to Stalin on his 60th birthday from the Vologda lacemakers
Photo: Ekaterina BARANOVA
Many exhibits are shown for the first time, for example, a panel with the coat of arms of the USSR, a gift from Vologda lacemakers to Stalin on his 60th birthday.
“Embroidery in general was very popular then, it was often present on the clothes of city residents and was done by hand, because there were no embroidery machines yet,” said Tamara Kazakova, deputy general director of exhibitions at the History Museum. Contemporary Russia. Russia, she told KP.
Homemade women’s belt made by a Karlag prisoner. To embroider, a woman exchanged a portion of bread for pieces of colored dough
From one country, enthusiasm and construction, and from the other, repression. Among the personal belongings of prisoners, victims of the repressions of the 1930s, you can see a variety of things, for example, a beautiful women’s belt made by a Karlag prisoner or a tuning fork. After all, the prisoners were people from various professions.
“People were imprisoned, but even there they participated in amateur orchestras, the prisoners believed that socialism was the right path, they were not bitter, they came out of prison and supported Stalin’s policies,” Tamara Kazakova noted.
But in Hitler’s concentration camps, where the main character of Sailor’s Silence, Abram Schwartz, was taken, the only thing that usually remained of people were simple jewelry, articles of clothing, or whole mountains of shoes.
The clothes of extermination camp prisoners became one of the important evidence at the Nuremberg trials. The crimes of the Nazis were captured by many artists, including Roman Efimenko, whose works are on display. In 1942 he was captured and spent almost three years in the Wewelsburg and Buchenwald concentration camps. Efimenko was a member of the underground international resistance committee, following whose instructions he created a whole series of drawings.
Gypsy beads found in the Oryol region during the exhumation of bodies shot by the Germans in 1942 of gypsies in the village of Nekrasovo.
Photo: Ekaterina BARANOVA
The story of the play’s creation is illustrated with a manuscript of the play signed by Alexander Galich, as well as photographs, costume sketches, set models, posters…
The viewer first saw the performance in 1988, when Oleg Tabakov staged the graduation performance “My Great Land” in his course at the Moscow Art Theater School. Three years later, already under the name “The Sailor’s Silence”, it appeared in the repertoire of the Tabakov Studio Theater and for many years remained one of the main productions of the theater. The role of Abram Schwartz occupied an important place in the acting biography of the current director of the theater, Vladimir Mashkov. The performance was already taken to many countries in the late 80s and was a great success.
The exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Russian History (Tverskaya, 21) will be available to visitors from September 16 to January 28, 2024.
