“The Current Kind of Museum Staff is Unsatisfactory...”: Soviet Scientific Politics and Training of Museum Personnel at the Leningrad Communist Institute of Political Enlightenment Named After N. K. Krupskaya in the Late 1930s — Early 1940s

Abstract

The article is devoted to the attempt to create on the basis of the Leningrad Communist Institute of political enlightenment named after N. K. Krupskaya training centre for museum workers. The research is based on numerous materials from the archives of Saint-Petersburg and Moscow. The author views the circumstances of the organization of the faculty of museum studies and local lore in this Institute, analyzes the curricula, restores the contingent of teachers. Education began here in 1938 and continued until the beginning of 1942, although as early as August 1940 a new enrollment of students was cancelled. The history of the educational centre is considered in the context of the scientific politics of the USSR in the 1930s and the place that was assigned to museums in it.