From 8 May 2020, the website Russia, My history: St Petersburg will host an online exhibition titled Subject To Restoration: Palaces of Tsarskoe Selo, Reborn from the Ashes.

A joint project of Tsarskoe Selo and St Petersburg’s museum and exhibition centre “Russia, My History”, the exhibition commemorates the 75th Anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941-45. It will launch a series of the centre’s projects for preservation of national historical memory during the 2020 Year of Memory and Glory in Russia.

‘Going online with this project is our response to the current challenge we all have to manage’, says Director Olga V. Taratynova of Tsarskoe Selo. The initially planned “normal” exhibition will hopefully follow later.

The online tour consists of several parts 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.

Our virtual 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. Ten pieces were saved by evacuation and one was found among the ruins of Koenigberg’s Royal Castle in 1946.

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

Our virtual visitors will also see surviving fragments of the original Amber Room, carved amber pieces from its middle- and lower-tier panels.