Lavrov Opens First Moscow Museum of First Russian Emigration

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 30 – This week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov opened the first museum in Moscow devoted to the first Russian emigration whose members, he said, had been “by the will of fate forced to leave their historical motherland” but whose memoirs and memorabilia are not back to serve the entire Russian world.

            The museum, which holds materials that began to be collected by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn when he was in his Vermont exile in the 1970s, is located in the House of Russia Abroad on the Taganka.  It includes some 250,000 items and some 350 personal archives of representatives of the first post-1917 emigration (vm.ru/news/650866.html).

            Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Natalya, who is president of the Solzhenitsyn Foundation, said at the opening that “three quarters of the 20^th century, the spiritual fruits of the Russian migration did not have access to the people. The most worthy names of people in science, the arts, music, and literature remained unknown to an entire generation of Soviet peoples.”

            “Now,” she continued, “we can know more about the history of our people.”