Treasured by Christina Riggs

Author:Christina Riggs [Riggs, Christina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2022-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

Raisa Shurinova and Saleh Ahmed Saleh inspect the mask of Tutankhamun before its installation in the Pushkin Museum, late November 1973

Opening night of ‘Treasures of the Tomb of Tutankhamun’ took place on 7 December 1973, when Antonova and the Minister for Culture, Ekaterina Furtseva, cut a ceremonial ribbon before crowds gathered in the museum’s Italian Hall. During its six-month Moscow run, until 20 May 1974, ‘Treasures’ attracted 1.2 million visitors, with late-night openings and timed entrances at two-hour intervals to accommodate them all. Even so, there were four-hour waiting times for individual tickets, priced at 1 rouble and 50 kopeks, five times the usual 30-kopek admission fee. Visitors were admitted in groups of 1,200 for a strictly observed 90-minute period, giving the security team half an hour to prepare for the next entrance.

Boris Piotrovsky welcomed ‘Treasures’ to the Hermitage between 3 July and 10 October 1974. The Leningrad venue hosted 800,000 visitors, using the same system of timed entrances. Egyptologist Andrei Bolshakov was already interested in ancient Egypt when he visited the exhibition as a teenager, with the entrance queue stretching down the Winter Canal. The exhibition design echoed Margaret Hall’s choices at the British Museum, with individually lit display cases in otherwise darkened galleries, so that the artefacts ‘seemed to hang in the darkness’.87 At a time when foreign travel was unthinkable for most people in the USSR, the exhibition brought Egypt closer and visitors travelled long distances to see it. One man, now based in Tatarstan, recalls travelling on a bus tour with fellow factory workers from his home in Pskov, 280 kilometres from Leningrad along the banks of the Neva.88 He was struck by the presence of numerous guards armed with Kalashnikov rifles, including one who stood on permanent duty next to the armoured case that held the gold mask.

Visitor comment books – a standard feature of Soviet exhibitions – record visitors from Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, and Siberia, along with several group visits by school and university students and members of the Komsomol youth organization. There were complaints about the small number of objects, the darkness, the armed guards, and the apparent requirement that women could not bring their handbags into the exhibition space. But most comments expressed amazement and delight for the privilege of seeing the magnificent objects, and gratitude to the people of Egypt for preserving them and allowing them to travel to Russia. Perhaps visiting employees of the Kalinin Atomic Power Station captured the luminous spirit of this Cold War occasion best: The enormous, impressive force of art provokes thoughts of kindness, of peace, of the desire for riches and power. There’s a lot of gold. Man has lived on earth for a short time. People, be more human, be better. They concluded: Thank you for a window into world culture.89

The last of the Soviet venues, and least only in size, was the National Art Museum in Kyiv, the historic capital city of Ukraine nestled on the high banks of the Dnieper. There, ‘Treasures’

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