Agency for Social Information

20 January 2025

Plaques bearing the names of two victims of the Great Purges of the 1930s – the lawyer, Pyotr Zhuk; and the psychologist, Isaak Shpilrein – which were removed by vandals, have been returned to their places on the walls of the Pushkin Museum. 

Source: Agency for Social Information

On 17 January, the journalist Ksenia Basilashvili posted on her account on the Russian messaging service Telegram that the plaques with the names of these two victims of repression in the 1930s had been removed from the front of the Pushkin Museum, a gallery dedicated to European and American art of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. 

The plaques were placed on the wall in 2019 with the support of The Last Address, a civic initiative to commemorate the victims of repressions in the Soviet Union. In the summer of 2024, unknown vandals tore them off the wall. The Museum’s Director, Elizaveta Likhacheva, ordered new ones to be put up – this time, without slots or any holes for screwdrivers to be inserted. This did not stop the unidentified vandals, who this time used either an axe or a chisel. 

After news of this broke, volunteers stuck paper copies of the plaques on the wall. 

‘Of course, this is completely unethical and unacceptable. But it is also completely baffling as to how a guarded building, in an area thoroughly covered by CCTV cameras, could be so vulnerable to vandalism,’ a representative of The Last Address foundation commented to the media outlet Podyom. 

The Foundation also commented that the tablets which had been removed were made by the Museum itself, and that the Museum should report this to the police as theft. 

On 20 January, it was announced that steel duplicates had been placed on the Museum’s wall over the weekend. 

‘The Last Address has no connection to this. The new plaques are put up by activists, who also put up cardboard plaques. This is the heart of the project. It is a grassroots movement, in that it is bottom-up. We are just the facilitators,’ the Foundation told the Agency of Social Information. 

Translated by Oscar Seecharan