State Museum of Oriental Art

On Nikitsky Boulevard, in a former noble estate, is housed the State Museum of Oriental Art — Russia’s largest collection of art from the peoples of Asia and the Caucasus, ranging from Japan and China to Transcaucasia, and from Central Asia to Buryatia and Chukotka. Today the collection numbers more than 160,000 items, and the museum traces its history back to the revolutionary years, when the young Soviet government decided to systematically study the cultures of the peoples that had joined the federation.

The initiative to create the museum belonged to the art historian Pavel Muratov, who was supported by Igor Grabar; in 1918 a decree was issued establishing “Ars Asiatica.” The early years were nomadic — the collection was housed at various times in rooms of the Historical Museum, the Museum of Ethnography, and the Tsvetkov Gallery on Kropotkinskaya Embankment. The first director was Fyodor Gogel, and in 1925 the institution was named the State Museum of Oriental Cultures. Only in 1929, after receiving the building of the former Church of Elijah the Prophet, could the staff begin full-scale scholarly work.

The core of the collection was formed by nationalized collections of private patrons: the merchant Pyotr Shchukin donated Persian, Indian, and Chinese antiquities from his private museum on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street, while the industrialist Pavel Kharitonenko, the perfumer Henri Brocard, and the orientalist Alexei Pozdneyev also gave up their collections. In 1926–1928, director Boris Denike organized archaeological expeditions to Old Termez, which yielded unique finds from the excavation of a medieval palace.

The war took a heavy toll on the museum: the collection was evacuated far from the front, to Novosibirsk in Siberia and Solikamsk in the Urals, and the staff was sharply reduced. Work in Moscow resumed in 1945, and the collection continued to grow through gifts from China, North Korea, Vietnam, and other countries undergoing decolonization. Throughout the entire postwar decade the museum remained above all a scholarly centre for the study of the cultures of the Soviet East.

A key turning point in the museum’s history came in 1970, when it was decided to move the collection to the Lunin estate on Nikitsky Boulevard — an 18th-century house rebuilt in 1818–1822 by the architect Domenico Gilardi in the Moscow Empire style, with an asymmetrical composition and an outbuilding of a layout unusual for the architect. Restoring the building for museum use took about a decade and a half, and the grand opening finally took place on 23 October 1984 — it coincided with the birthday of the artist Svetoslav Roerich and was accompanied by an exhibition of more than five hundred paintings by Nicholas and Svetoslav Roerich, which drew huge queues.

In 1991 the museum was granted the status of a cultural heritage site and its current name — the State Museum of Oriental Art — and in 2017 a branch devoted to the Roerich family opened. Today the institution combines the functions of a scholarly centre, a repository of unique oriental collections, and one of Moscow’s most sought-after venues for exhibitions, lectures, and cultural programmes related to the art and history of Asia and the Caucasus.