Kulak burying the grain. Sabotage in the ‘Iskra’ kolkhoz. A. K. Supinskii, Belorussiia i BSSR, Potevoditel’ k ekspozitii, Leningrad, 1935.
These exhibitions, as forms of representation, served to organise and control the perception and the ‘correct’ understanding of ethno-national cultures. What was important was not the authenticity of description, but its correspondence to a simple and clear schema: the difficult, hapless, wretched pre-Revolutionary life vs. the happy, civilized Soviet reality. But how successful were these representations? The institutional authority of the museum, as a repository of original, authentic objects, was meant to endow these exhibits with the power to describe ethnographic reality ‘objectively’. These objects were supposed to serve as ‘documents of an era’ and ‘embodiments of cultural reality’. However, they also needed to correspond to the expectations of the public at large. Otherwise, even the ‘masking’ devices used in the new exhibition strategy, directed at ‘essentialisting’ the cultures on display (e.g. the reconstruction scenes, the explanatory texts and other auxiliary illustrative materials), could not guarantee a positive response from the audience.
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