Marina Loshak, director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, has announced her resignation. She will be replaced by Elizaveta Likhacheva, director of the National Museum of Architecture Shchusev.
Loshak, who was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and moved to Moscow in 1986, had held the position since 2013 and had gained a reputation for organizing important collaborations with national and international institutions. The Pushkin Museum is the largest museum dedicated to Western art in Moscow.
His decision to resign is linked to the escalating crackdown on dissenting voices in Russia. His daughter and nephew are both journalists who were classified as “foreign agents” by Putin’s government and fled Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.
The move also comes just over a month after The ousting of Zelfira Tregulova from the State Tretyakov Gallery and quick replacement by Elena Pronicheva, whose father is a retired military man who served as deputy director of the Federal Security Service. The organization was also led in the 1990s by Vladimir Putin, who continued to oversee it closely as president.
“I was a director for 10 years,” Loshak said in a statement about her departure from the Pushkin Museum. “You need the next person to come with new energy, new thoughts and new ambitions to continue what others have started.”
According to a report in The arts journal, the appointment of new director Likhacheva at the Shchusev Museum in 2017 was challenged by museum staff who started a petition claiming she was not experienced enough for the role. Despite this, she reportedly managed to modernize the museum and increase its annual visitors to 11,000.
Agentstvo, an opposition media site, however, reported that Likhacheva previously worked for the Russian Interior Ministry. He also cited leaked tax documents that apparently show she worked for a pro-Kremlin movement in the early 2000s.
Meanwhile, Mikhail Piotrovsky, who runs the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, has long been favored by Putin and has openly supported the war in Ukraine. In June, TANNING reported, he described the Russian exhibits as a “powerful cultural offensive” and a “special operation”, echoing the official Russian terminology for “special military operation” warfare.
“We are coming,” he added. “And no one can be allowed to interfere with our offensive.”
A former curator of contemporary art at the Hermitage, Dmitri Ozerkov, resigned after 22 years in October, declaring on Instagram: “I left because I don’t intend to have anything in common with today’s Russia.”
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