Sorry for the Group Email

Finding a contemporary history museum in Russia can be a bit of a challenge. Things aren’t helped by the fact that the last hundred years of Russian history are a mere drop in a particularly capacious ocean; some elements of Russian history are as old as humanity itself, and assigning extra importance to Russian communism seems unfair.

Still, that’s the kind of nasty piece of work I am, so we headed for the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow.

Don’t expect English. In the summer, it’s possible to pay (through the nose) for English-speaking tours, but there were none while we were there. None of the explanatory cards are in English, so we spent an amiable few hours peering through glass cages at Russia’s view of communism, assigning our own, probably wrong, explanations.

It is, without translation, at least, a lopsided affair.

The often-brutal Soviet occupation of the Soviet Bloc isn’t mentioned at all; nor is the pivotal Cuban missile crisis. Bizarrely, the downfall of the USSR gets barely a shelf to itself; one minute you’re in the seventies, the next it’s all capitalism and disarmament. You can, of course, forget all mention of the gulags. It’s disappointing, because a museum like this is a huge chance for Russians to confront the ugliness of the mid-twentieth century, and without a mention of Stalin’s paranoid dispersal of dissidents, the rest rings a little hollow.

But there are fascinating elements. Pictures of the revolutionaries fermenting revolution and of the authorities trying to stop them are fascinating, and the Russian view of World War II (or the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians prefer to call it) is worth going for alone.

The museum costs 100r to get in (about £2), and you can’t take pictures at all. The café is also worth a look, if only to see somewhere to eat that seemingly hasn’t moved since Yeltsin. The gift-shop is also worth a look, albeit an expensive option for those simply seeking Soviet tat to send home.

Tags: contemporary history, cuban missile crisis, disarmament, dispersal, dissidents, glass cages, great patriotic war, gulags, history museum, mid twentieth century, nasty piece of work, revolutionaries, Russia, russian communism, russian history, russian view, soviet bloc, soviet occupation, speaking tours, ugliness, world war ii