In the latest departure from a top museum in Russia, Marina Loshak resigned from her position as director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. She was replaced by Elizaveta Likhacheva, the current director of the National Museum of Architecture Shchusev in Moscow.
The current upheaval in the Russian museum world is linked to the ideological repression following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. By the way, Loshak’s daughter and nephew are both opposition journalists who left Russia after the invasion. They have both been labeled “foreign agents” by the Department of Justice.
Likhacheva’s appointment comes just weeks after ousting of Zelfira Tregulova of the State Tretyakov Gallery. Tregulova was replaced by Elena Pronicheva, the daughter of a former head of the Federal Security Service associated with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In 2013 Loshak, who moved from Odessa, Ukraine to Moscow in 1986, replaced Irina Antonova who led the Pushkin Museum for more than 50 years. Like Antonova, she was known for organizing large international projects. More recently, she was in charge of staging exhibitions of the Shchukin and Morozov modernist art collections from before 1917 with the Louis Vuitton Foundation and the Hermitage Museum, even as they became more difficult then impossible to organize against the background of war.
On Tuesday, the Pushkin Museum released a statement by Loshak and credits him with a long list of accomplishments, including digitization, restoration, building expansion and regional development projects.
Loshak said “moving on” was her creed: “I was the director of the museum for ten years. You need the next person to come with new energy, new thoughts, and new ambitions to continue what others have started.
Likhacheva’s appointment as director of the Shchusev Museum in 2017 sparked protests from some museum staff. A petition was started in which employees criticized him for having insufficient degrees and management experience for the job, among other issues.
But she ended her tenure as director with positive reviews for upgrading her facilities, opening up the collection and attracting young visitors. A statement from the Culture Ministry on his appointment to Pushkin said the number of visitors to the architectural museum had quadrupled to 110,000 a year under his leadership.
However, Agentstvo, an investigative news site created by opposition media, announced Monday that according to leaked tax documents, in the early 2000s Likhacheva was a paid employee of a pro-Kremlin youth movement known for targeting liberal cultural figures.
