Money Woes May Close Russian Museum
November 24, 2000
By ANGELA CHARLTON
MOSCOW (AP) - The artifacts of Soviet repression and post-Soviet human rights
abuses displayed in Moscow's Sakharov Museum may soon have nowhere to hang.
The museum, dedicated to dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei
Sakharov, will close its doors next month unless it finds new funding, its
director warns. And its painful, powerful exhibits - letters Sakharov wrote
from internal exile, barbed wire from gulag labor camps, sketches by children
made homeless by Russia's current war in Chechnya - will be packed away.
Although its content is highly political, the museum's woes don't stem from
government pressure. The problem, director Yuri Samodurov says, is that
Russia lacks a culture of corporate giving, wealthy private donors and
experience managing private, nonprofit organizations.
Also, as memories of Soviet horrors fade amid the time-consuming turmoil of
today's Russia, fewer and fewer people seem interested in what the museum has
to say.
``We are searching with all our strength for Russian investment, but it's not
working,'' Samodurov said. ``In Russia there is no experience and no
tradition of nongovernment museums. We are discovering for ourselves how to
survive.''
So far, to museum workers' dismay, that has meant they rely almost entirely
on U.S. and other foreign funding to tell a very Russian story. Since opening
in 1996, the Sakharov Museum and human rights center has failed to find
Russian donors and has exhausted $1.7 million in start-up money that came
largely from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
A U.S. diplomat in Moscow said this week that a new grant was under
negotiation. If approved, it would provide about a six-month reprieve but
would not solve the museum's deeper problems, the diplomat warned.
Other non-governmental organizations in Russia pin the museum's troubles on
the country's legal system: It does not allow companies to write off charity
donations on taxes, and it taxes NGOs more heavily than in the West.
Also, the museum's political bent and U.S. backing may be scaring domestic
investors away, Samodurov said.
The museum, in an elegant two-story building that once housed a police
station, documents the dissident movement and mass persecutions by the Soviet
secret police. Displays include an execution order by dictator Josef Stalin
and guitars used to accompany protest songs.
It also highlights more recent abuses, particularly in two wars in Chechnya
over the past decade. Human rights groups accuse Russian troops in the
breakaway republic of summary executions of civilians and prisoners and of
looting Chechen homes - charges Russian commanders deny.
``Our society and government even now don't understand what we are rejecting
of our past, and what we are preserving. Our museum has a very clear position
on this point, and it is not popular,'' Samodurov said.
Meanwhile, memorial ceremonies for the millions killed or exiled in Soviet
repressions shrink every year as labor camp survivors die off and former
democracy activists focus on surviving in the new Russia.
``Many people today view (the museum) with indifference,'' said Yuri Zapol,
president of Russia's biggest advertising company, Video International.
Zapol was among the few executives who responded to the museum's appeals for
corporate help. He has helped publicize its predicament and has promised a
personal donation. But there are no plans for the company to sponsor the
museum, he said.
``In the history of Russia there weren't that many people on the scale of
Sakharov. Unquestionably, our society needs such people,'' he said. ``But not
everybody is of my opinion.''
Sakharov, a physicist who helped develop the Soviet nuclear bomb, later
became an eloquent, outspoken critic of the Communist regime. In 1979, he was
banished to the city of Gorky. Released by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in
1986, Sakharov helped spearhead the democracy movement in the waning days of
the Communist regime before he died in 1989.
