Tracing An-sky’s Collections after the Liquidation of the Jewish Historic Ethnographic Society in 1930

“Tracing An-sky’s collections after the liquidation of the Jewish Historic Ethnographic Society in 1930” will describe the fate of the famous ethnographic collections gathered by S. An-sky in the Jewish Pale of Settlement before the First World War and displayed in the first Jewish Museum in Russia. The history of this museum that was opened on the eve of the Revolution reflect the rise and fall of the Jewish ethnographic movement in the young Soviet state. It was characteristic for the Soviet interwar period that Jewish public institutions created in the course of the indigenization campaign would fall victim to the dramatic shift in the Stalinist national policies in the early 1930ies. This paper will discuss the political and museological issues of the An-sky’s collection distribution between Jewish museums and scholarly institutes of Odessa, Vitebsk and Kiev.