The State Museum Fund: Genesis and meaning of the concept (1918–1991)

Abstract

The article analyzes the formation and evolution of the concept of the State Museum Fund. It appeared after the events of October 1917 during the construction of a new system of state regulation of museum practice. After the October Revolution, the Bolshevik government nationalized the tsar's palaces, part of public and private collections, museums, as well as the property of church. This huge complex of nationalized objects was defined as the State Museum Fund. There were several stages in the development of the concept of the State Museum Fund. The first stage (1918 - late 1920's) is associated with the emergence of the concept in the state cultural policy. In 1918-1919 the development of the concept was carried out simultaneously on several levels: the state level (Moscow Declaration), legislative level (project of Decree on the establishment of a unified State Museum Fund) and academic level (museological works of F. Schmit). During the second stage (1930's - early 1960's), the new forms of the state control and organization of museum collections were established. The third stage (mid 1960's - mid 1990's) is characterized by the approval of the concept at the legislative level. In 1965 the first Regulation on the Museum Fund of the USSR was adopted. The development of the museological knowledge and the improvement of the organization of the museum work led to a clarification of the definition of the Museum Fund of the USSR in the late 1980's. A new phase of the development of the concept began in the 1990's. The concept of a unified State Museum Fund remained in the museum policy of the states that formed after the collapse of the USSR. In the mid-1990's in Belarussia, Russia and Ukraine, legislation was adopted in the field of museum affairs, which reinforced the new legal definitions of the concept under consideration. At the same time, studies of the conceptual foundations of the unified State Museum Fund are practically absent.