Front Diaries

23 June – 16 August 2020

The exhibition is dedicated to a feat of Soviet actors, who inspired heroic defenders at the rear and at all fronts of the great war. The project is dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the Great Victory in the Year of Memory and Glory that was proclaimed in the Russian Federation in 2020. In 2005, the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum presented the exhibition “Theatrical front diary”, in 2010 — the exhibition “Theatrical Moscow in 1941–1945.” The exhibition “Diaries of frontline brigades” completes the trilogy, and yet it doesn’t finish the museum’s research but outlines prospects for its further development. About 4 thousands of theatre-concert and circus brigades worked for Red Army units at fronts during the war. There were 25 front theatres; the collectives involved novice and renown actors. The main idea of the exhibition is to show the contribution of art workers to the great Victory over Nazi invaders from a special perspective, through diaries of frontline brigades. We highlight the special role the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum played in documenting this contribution. The exposition includes historical documents that were created with direct participation of the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum. This evidence appeared owing to a museum initiative. At the very beginning of the war, workers of the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum made an appeal for all theatres and frontline brigades to keep diaries of their performances at the front. The museum workers designed a template, achieved publishing the diaries and handed them out to theatres and frontline brigades in the hope of getting them back when the war ended. That's how the museum workers executed their mission of documenting theatre history and also showed their confidence in victory. 253 diaries were handed out in total. Today The Archives and Manuscripts Department holds a little over 70. The exhibition will represent the diaries of theatres not only from Moscow and Leningrad but also from Stalinabad, Tashkent, Buguruslan, Voronezh, Sverdlovsk, Ivanovo, Kostroma, Tula, Odessa and many others. The exhibition will show the documented feat of art workers during the war. A diary of the museum curator V.A. Yermolov will demonstrate the life of the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum in the hard times of the war. About 700 photos of frontline brigades’ performances were made by museum workers V.P. Botov and N.M. Popov; some of these photos are showcased. The main aim of the exhibition is to show the front diary as a museum object as well as a special form of art workers’ collective memory. In addition to the installation of the diaries, the exposition is based on a dialog with the exhibition “Theatre at the front (1941–1942)” that was organized by the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum during the war. We represent items from those historical exhibition: paintings, graphics, scale modes, photos; authentic items connected to famous and half-forgotten actors. Visitors will also see valuable exhibits from museum collections that were evacuated to the Urals during the war: works by Konstantin Korovin, Alexander Golovin, Sergey Sudeykin, Pyotr Konchalovsky. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog of rare materials from our museum collections.