For art-loving Muscovites, the choice has always been simple. If you admire Russian artists, you go to the Tretyakov Gallery, which looks like a giant Russian terem and houses the largest collection of Russian art in Moscow.
If you prefer European painting, you go to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, designed in the Greek classical style it has the largest collection of Western art in the capital. Both places are sacred to those who spent cold, dark winter weekends there as children — and developed a habit of always returning.
In mid-January, Ekaterina Pronicheva, the 48-year-old daughter of a prominent FSB general, was appointed the new director of the Pushkin Museum. The same day, her younger sister Elena, 42 years old, resigned as a director of the Tretyakov Gallery. Even by Russian standards, the fact that two daughters of an FSB general had been in charge of Moscow’s two most important museums was extraordinary.
Vladimir Pronichev, their father, is not just any old FSB officer. A veteran of the KGB special forces with a combat record in Afghanistan, he made his career breakthrough in the mid-1990s, when he was appointed to head the FSB department in Karelia, a region bordering Finland, replacing Nikolai Patrushev, Putin’s close friend and ally. Soon afterwards, Patrushev took him to Moscow, and once Putin became FSB director in 1998, he made Pronichev his deputy in charge of counterterrorism — easily the agency’s most challenging job at a time of serious political violence.
It was Pronichev who supervised the disastrous FSB-led operation to free hostages in 2002 at Moscow’s Dubrovka theater, taken hostage by a group of Chechen militants, which ended with more than 130 hostages dead from poisonous gas pumped into the auditorium by the special forces. He also supervised the similarly disastrous 2004 FSB operation at a school in Beslan, which left more than 300 people dead, most of them children.
None of this prevented Vladimir Putin from promoting Pronichev to General of the Army — the second-highest military rank, equivalent to a US four-star general. It was a remarkable achievement. In the 1990s, the rank was a rare mark of prestige: not all FSB directors received it, and Putin himself had never reached that level while serving as FSB chief. Pronichev retired in 2013 but remained one of the most decorated and respected generals of Putin’s favored agency.
That standing undoubtedly aided the careers of his daughters in Moscow’s cultural world, where major institutions, from theaters to museums, are state-controlled and senior appointments are made either by the mayor or by the Ministry of Culture. This is why the news about the women’s careers was announced by Olga Lyubimova, Russia’s minister of culture, and one of the protagonists of our book Our Dear Friends in Moscow.
The dominance of the FSB general’s daughters in Moscow’s cultural field stretches back nearly 15 years. Ekaterina Pronicheva was first appointed deputy head of the Moscow City Government’s Department of Culture, a position that gave her oversight of funding for museums, theaters, and festivals. She then took a senior role at the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy, a vast and generously funded showcase of Soviet accomplishment — from agriculture to space — founded by Stalin to impress capitalist competitors. Her next position, as a director of the Museum of White Monuments of Vladimir and Suzdal (the oldest Russian cathedrals and churches), provided another signal that she had the Kremlin’s favor.
Her January promotion is different and takes her to a vertiginous level in Russia’s cultural firmament. Among all Moscow’s cultural institutions, the Pushkin stands apart. The museum, which houses one of Russia’s most impressive collections of European art, was founded in 1912 by the father of the famous Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva and became beloved by the public for its connection to European history, from Ancient Greece to the Italian Renaissance. It provided an affordable window into Western culture.
Yet the Pushkin is not only about the distant past. In post-Soviet Russia, it found itself in the international spotlight. For more than 30 years, attention has focused on the shameful origins of the collection known as Schliemann’s Gold — more than 200 items, including jewelry, vessels, and weapons discovered in the late 19th century by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann at the site of ancient Troy, in modern-day Turkey.
That collection was captured by the Soviet Army and taken as booty from Berlin to the Soviet Union in 1945, and was kept hidden in the storerooms of the Pushkin for many decades, until its exposure by courageous museum employees in the early 1990s. Today, it remains a subject of international dispute, with Germany and Turkey demanding its return. The Russian stance, now that the collection’s presence in Moscow can no longer be denied, is defiance, and the items are displayed on the Pushkin Museum’s website.
In the fall, the issue returned to the national conversation with the publication of Pushkin director Irina Antonova’s biography, by bestselling Russian author Lev Danilkin.
Antonova, who led the museum for more than 50 years, played an active role in concealing the Schliemann collection. Danilkin’s book was praised by many intellectuals, but outraged Russian nationalists and Kremlin propagandists angered that the subject was being discussed in depth for the first time since the 1990s. They remain convinced that taking art objects as war trophies was completely justified by Russia’s suffering during the war.
As a result, throughout the autumn, Moscow society debated the Pushkin Museum’s complicity in hiding art stolen after the war — a subject that sounds strikingly contemporary in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine, where cultural artefacts have been stolen. It was yet another example of the Russians speaking about the past as a way to address the sensitivities of the present while bypassing strict censorship.
As always, the regime responded in the way it knows best — by appointing an arch loyalist who can be relied on to do the “right” thing. The Ministry of Culture decided that no one but the daughter of a prominent FSB general could be entrusted with running the country’s most Western-oriented museum during wartime.
Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. Their book Our Dear Friends in Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation, was published in June.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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