Soviet everyday life in the expositions of historical museums of St. Petersburg

Abstract

This article is devoted to the analysis of Soviet everyday life culture in the expositions of St. Petersburg’s historical museums. The problem of demonstration of the culture of everyday life in museum has almost not been considered in museology, so the topic of the article is of immediate interest. The main aim of the article is to determine the basic principles of exhibiting museum items related to the everyday life of a Soviet citizen coming from various cultural and historical contexts of the twentieth century. A significant problem for this study is the search for theoretical approaches to the representation of everyday life in the modern museum space in Russia. The main part of the research is the analysis of the expositions of the State Museum of History of St. Petersburg in the Rumyantsev Mansion (“NEP: The Image of the City and Man”, “From Weekdays to Holidays — Urban Sketches from the 1930s”), the State Museum of Political History of Russia (“The Soviet era: between utopia and reality”) that demonstrate various phenomena of everyday-life of Soviet society using various methods of exposing. As a result of the study, it became clear that the representation of the culture of Soviet everyday life in Saint-Petersburg’s museums is carried out on the basis of museum reconstruction of certain significant phenomena in their relation to the socio-cultural or historical-political context. In addition, in the course of the study, the main methods of constructing expositions were revealed: it turned out that the so-called “mixed” method based on the principle of combining background secondary materials that reproduce authentic documents and images with objects of everyday life and other material objects is often used to represent the culture of everyday life.

Keywords:

culture of everyday life, historical museums of St. Petersburg, Soviet everyday life, exposition, historical exposition complex