How the archive of the State Center of Russian Folklore is destroyed

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

On November 28, the Ministry of Culture actually put an end to the long-term research of Russian folklore: by its order, without any approvals and prior notice, the huge archive of the State Center of Russian Folklore (GTSRF) was taken out of its premises.

Soon the entire archive, consisting of about 170,000 unique works of folk art collected in expeditions, the center's library and the results of its scientific research, will be transferred to the disposal of the State Russian House of Folk Art named after V. D. Polenov - an organization that has never been involved in scientific activities. By the decision of the Director of the Department of State Support for Art and Folk Art Andrey Malyshev, the staff of the Folklore Center were asked orally to submit a letter of resignation of their own free will.

“In fact, this is a raider seizure of the Folklore Center,” says its deputy head, famous musician and folklorist Sergei Starostin. “Without an archive, our activity is impossible, and the Ministry of Culture understands this.”

Rumors of an imminent final disbandment leaked into the center in mid-November. A year earlier, the State Center for the Development of the Russian Federation was deprived of a legal entity by the Ministry of Culture and placed at the disposal of a structure called Roskultproekt. There is very little information about this structure in open sources; it is known that it is headed by Oleg Ivanov, who previously held the post of deputy chairman of the Nikita Mikhalkov's Union of Cinematographers of Russia and never had any relation to the study of the traditional heritage.

Roskultproekt cut the staff of the center by half, cut funding many times, evicted it from its premises and sent it along with the archive and library to the basement of one of the buildings belonging to the ministry. Then the final dissolution of the center was suspended, but its work was actually paralyzed.

Some of the remaining employees were forced to leave the center during the year under pressure from the new management, and the rest were not even given shelves to unpack the archive and restore the center's work. A few days before the information about the dissolution of the center appeared on behalf of Roskultproekt, tenders were placed for the purchase of material support for several million rubles. Information about whether other organizations other than the GCRF are under the jurisdiction of the structure was also not found in open sources.

On November 15, a petition of the center appeared on the change.org website, addressed to the head of the Ministry of Culture, Vladimir Medinsky, with a request to stop the dissolution of the center. It said that the staff learned that they were planning to transfer the center to the House of Folk Art, a federal network of Houses and Palaces of Culture that had never been involved in research activities.

“They don't even have such activities in the charter,” Starostin says about the prospects of merging with the House of Creativity. “To do this, you need to rewrite the charter, change the structures … I have a question for the officials: why arrange all this confusion and mix the two structures if we are doing absolutely different things?”

The center's petition is addressed directly to the Minister of Culture, since the employees of the center believe that the officials directly in charge of this area in the ministry deliberately avoid meetings with the employees of the center and are silent about what is happening. To the natural question about the level of awareness of Medinsky himself, Starostin answers as follows:

“Medinsky doesn't have to be informed. He has both advisers and department directors who can explain to him popularly what is happening in their areas. The director of our department, Andrei Malyshev, is simply incompetent in his question, he believes that this is an optimization that will benefit everyone.

I understand that ministerial officials do not read the petitions, but I think that at the moment it is important for the public to speak out on this topic."

Over 26 years of activity, the SCRF has earned a special reputation not only for its research, but also for music festivals, courses in local music techniques and propaganda for the preservation of traditional heritage. One can only guess about the motives of its merger with a non-core organization, according to Starostin - maybe someone in the ministry just liked the center's premises, and in the absence of a specialized department, none of the officials began to defend it.

“The scientific study of folklore is an extremely important task that must be solved at the state level. The approach to folklore as to amateur performance is unacceptable,”comments Maria Nefedova on the news about the imminent dissolution of the center. She has been the head of the Dmitry Pokrovsky Ensemble for twenty years. One of the oldest and most authoritative folklore groups in the country managed to raise a huge wave of interest in authentic folk music in the eighties. On this wave, not only many other collectives arose, but also the research center of the State Center for the Development of the Russian Federation.

“A wave of interest in folklore has been and continues to go from town to village,” says Maria Nefedova. “She helped in many ways to raise the self-awareness of the village youth, who began to be interested in and understand folk music. In one of the expeditions to the Kuban, in response to a request to introduce us to local performers, we were asked - what kind of groups are you interested in - authentic folk or folk?"

Until recently, among professional folklore performers, the attitude towards this dichotomy was relatively calm. Amateur circles have long existed, as it were, in parallel with the world of authentic music, there is no direct competition between them, and different recreation centers often provide their sites to folklore groups. During the Soviet period, however, the situation was somewhat different, Starostin says:

“For ten centuries Russia was a country of peasants who had their own intangible culture. She expressed herself through words, music, rituals and other things. After 1917, it was necessary to get rid of this deeply held in the depths of the people. Perhaps such a task was not set directly, but throughout all the years of the existence of Soviet power, this culture was replaced by images that could be ordered by the composer, asking him to compose "something a la folk". Thus, a whole layer of collective farm culture appeared, which took its place in the villages in spite of the existence of the root culture. The people tried to preserve their heritage as best they could, realizing all the falsity of what is being offered to them, feeling this substitution. This can be sustained for one or two generations, but after the revolution three or four generations have passed.

This whole movement for folk music in the eighties began in many respects with the fact that researchers and performers began to sound the archives. The intelligentsia then realized that in the depths of our culture there are absolutely fantastic things, that our culture is not a collective farm culture”.

In addition to the petition, which collected 18,000 signatures in less than two weeks, Sergei Starostin posted a video message calling for an end to the disbandment. The community of folklorists reacted immediately - videos began to appear on social networks under the hashtag #supportfolk, in which groups of performers and researchers of traditional heritage performed folk songs and made their video messages in support of the center.

The Ministry of Culture has not received a single written order or order with a signature. According to Starostin, when Andrei Malyshev called today the head of the House of Folk Art Tamara Purtova with the order to take out the archive of the State Center for the Development of the Russian Federation, she was no less surprised than the employees of the center.

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