Russian Museums: Russia’s First Design Museum is Racing to Preserve its Greatest Soviet-era Treasures

Moscow Design Museum’s archive has been racing against time to recover the quickly disappearing artifacts of Soviet design history. For a period that stretches from the 1920s to the dissolution of the union seven decades later, this means sifting through what has become discarded as junk and tracking down elderly designers who are surprised to be remembered at all.

But for Sankova, who is also the museum’s director, the question was why wasn’t anyone documenting this important cultural heritage of Russia, one that included movements that were hugely influential to Modernist design, like avant-garde and Constructivism. She and her friends started the country’s first museum dedicated to design.

The original plan was to retrofit a bus, but after a fortuitous meeting with the director of Moscow’s biggest exhibition space, the Manege, the museum found a home and opened in 2012 with its first show, Soviet Design: 1950s to 1980s. This era is also the focus of the museum’s archive, which was born out of the personal collections of its founders. When the museum took off, the archive expanded to include industrial design objects with the help of the founders’ former professors and their friends, many of whom worked in the All Union Institute of Technical Aesthetics (known by its Russian acronym VNIITE), a government design research organization that ran for from 1962-2002.

Aside from the output of VNIITE, the museum also holds the archives of the Union of Designers of the Soviet Union that was established in the 1980s, as well as avant-garde period publications including Left Front of the Arts (LEF), which was edited by poet Vladimir Mayakoysky, and 30 Days magazine, which was the product of collaborations with designers such as Rodchenko, Irina Schtenberg, and Yuri Pimenov, amongst others. It also holds several private archives of designers, including that of Vladimir Runge, the chief designer of Krasnogorsk Mechanical Factory, where many legendary cameras were made, including the Zenit-E.

While the museum’s archive has grown considerably, it faces the arduous task of properly documenting each object. There are plans to digitize the materials for public access and include them in future exhibitions, but for now the non-profit organization can only rely on volunteers and a single dedicated archivist, Valentia Mokrousova, who resumes her role at VNIITE.

“We know that time is running out now, and the countdown is in seconds, not even minutes. And if we do not collect this heritage, it will be lost forever,” Sankova says.