Skip to main content
05.11.2021

The exhibition Subject To Restoration: Palaces of Tsarskoe Selo, Reborn from the Ashes, a joint project by Tsarskoe Selo and St Petersburg’s museum and exhibition centre Russia, My History launched in May 2020 and traveling across Russia since then, has reached Siberia.

After St Petersburg, Perm, Sarapul and Chelyabinsk, the city of Novosibirsk houses the exhibition from 3 November to 12 December 2021, then the exhibits will return home. Novosibirsk was chosen as the final venue on purpose, because 80 years ago the city's opera and ballet theatre building stored Tsarskoe Selo's evacuated collections from late 1941 to 1945.

The exhibition consists of several sections tracing the milestones of the Museum’s history from the prewar time to the present day. The heroic evacuation of the artifacts in 1941 and the unprecedented postwar restoration are specially accentuated. Documents, photographs, wartime newsreel frames, Autochromes, paintings and pieces of decorative and applied art, as well as explications and extended annotations, help illustrate the dramatic narrative. Visitors can see the objects that are usually stored in our reserve collection and never put on our permanent displays.

The exhibits include a chair from the Chinese Hall of the Catherine Palace, one of a lacquered set of 47 export-designed chairs made in Guangzhou in the 1770s. Only ten pieces were saved by evacuation and one was found among the ruins of Koenigberg’s Royal Castle in 1946.

Also notable is the journal of Senior Efreitor Kurt Büttner, presented to the Museum by his son Reinhold in 2000. Kurt participated in the Leningrad offense and the Pushkin town occupation in 1941.

Particularly noteworthy are the surviving fragments of the original Amber Room, the authentic pieces of carved amber from its middle- and lower-tier panels.