Curating Propaganda: How Russia Weaponizes Museums in Wartime

In April, the chairman of the Russian Investigative Committee—one of the pillars of President Vladimir Putin’s repressive machine—ordered the establishment of an internal cultural council. Its purpose is to “coordinate the dialogue” between law-enforcement bodies, public organizations, and cultural workers. According to the committee’s chair, Alexander Bastrykin, this is paramount for forming patriotism, civic engagement, and traditional moral values among youth. The proper framing of the Second World War and the war in Ukraine will be one of the main focuses.

This is one of the latest instances of the government tightening its grip on culture and weaponizing museums for wartime propaganda efforts.

In December 2021, three months before the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, GES-2 had a grand opening. This $130 million pharaonic museum of contemporary art sits just across the Moskva River from the Kremlin. The celebrated Italian architect Renzo Piano, winner of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, and designer of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, led the ambitious reconstruction of the twentieth-century power plant in which the museum is. GES-2 attracted some of the best talents from Russia and abroad. It was meant to become a nexus of modern cultural leisure, with workshops, talks, high-end restaurants, a library, and fashion shows. Instead, it ended up as a self-censoring worrywart.

The mesmerizing, spacious building even has its own cinema, birch grove, and ice-skating rink, but lacked the most important part—a message. The art was cute, but hollow.

Before GES-2 opened to the public, its founder, the billionaire oligarch Leonid Mikhelson, who owns Russia’s largest non-state-owned natural-gas provider, hosted a private tour for Putin and Moscow’s mayor, Sergey Sobyanin. Some reports say both were not only unimpressed but also borderline furious with the highbrow hipster haven. GES-2 was never planned to be a political megaphone, but times were changing and even its toothless exhibits were deemed too much.

Founding curator-director Teresa Mavica soon stepped down, and Mikhelson started interfering with the exhibit program and content. An artistic workshop on the history of Russian authority was cancelled at the last moment. Some works were removed for “being too provocative”. One performance’s name was changed from “God, Moscow” to “Unnamed”. Shouts and murmurs circulated throughout Moscow. Three days before the invasion, GES-2 announced it had hired a government-relations expert. Once the war started, the museum described itself as “a neutral and apolitical territory where there’s no space for emotional and rash declarations”.

Since February 2022, many of GES-2’s team have left. According to some reports, Mikhelson is constantly pressured by the Presidential Administration to host more patriotic events and tries to walk a tightrope. There were rumors that he was hoping to sell the whole thing. Meanwhile, the museum still stands, hosting several mediocre exhibits and workshops. The coffee is good, though.

The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, owned by oligarch Roman Abramovich, was not as fortunate. It was shut down for two years after the war started, faced a series of raids by security forces, and endured a siege by pro-war activists.

As the country descended into wartime censorship, a wave of personnel reshuffling in all the key cultural institutions began.

In January 2023, the Ministry of Culture demanded that the State Tretyakov Gallery update its exhibitions to follow traditional Russian spiritual and moral values. According to a special decree signed by Putin, these values include human rights, patriotism, serving the homeland, family, and spiritual superiority over materialism. The demand came after a complaint from the public that it displayed artefacts of a destructive ideology, and that visits there felt left people feeling overwhelmingly pessimistic, hopeless, and hollow. Within a month, a new head was appointed.

Elena Pronicheva stepped into this role. Born in Melitopol in Ukraine (now occupied), she is an experienced museum administrator and the daughter of a prominent FSB general.

Mikhail Piotrovsky, the long-standing head of the State Hermitage Museum and a vocal Putin supporter, is one of the few firmly holding their ground. He and his son, Boris, who is vice-governor of Saint Petersburg, are heavily involved in cultural policy in Ukraine’s occupied territories.

More than forty Ukrainian museums are now controlled and actively integrated into Russia’s museum infrastructure. Some museum workers decided to collaborate, some were kidnapped and tortured, and most of the museums have newly appointed directors. These are signing partnerships with various institutions across Russia, participating in events, receiving awards, and speaking on state TV.

Mariupol’s obliterated Museum of Local Lore now hosts some exhibits from the Russian National Guard. The Museum of Azov Everyday Life was turned into the Museum of Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s propaganda chief, who was a key figure in the Great Purge of the 1930s and was responsible for the repressive Soviet cultural police that terrorized Ukraine’s intelligentsia.

In June 2023, directors of museums in the occupied territories traveled to Tula and participated in talks and lectures to learn how museums in Russia function.

New museums are being established in the occupied territories, all with a single goal: promoting the proper ideology and crafting a new identity. These include museums of Russian Cossacks, the Museum of Russian Icon Painting, the museums of Donbas Labor Valor and of WWII Resistance, and the Museum of Film History. In the first year and a half of the occupation, more than fifty exhibitions were organized across the occupied territories.

The Ministry of Culture states that the proper framing of the war in Ukraine and its historical context are the focal points of its efforts, inside Russia and in the occupied territories.

An internal ministry document—“Methodological Recommendations for Creating Exhibitions Dedicated to the History of the Special Military Operation in Museums of the Russian Federation”—lays out straightforwardly the groundwork for historical and memory revisionism. According to it, Russia considers Donbas and southeastern Ukraine as historically Russian territories, with the 2014 Revolution of Dignity characterized as an illegal coup in Kyiv. The war is justified, the document states, as a means to protect the identity and rights of Russian-speaking Ukrainians.

It therefore comes as no surprise that museums presenting an alternative to the government’s version of history are facing sanctions.

Moscow’s infamous GULAG History State Museum, established in 2001, was shut down in November 2024. Officials claimed this was due to fire-safety violations, but the real reason is censorship. The director of the museum, Roman Romanov, was fired soon after. The story made headlines. Elizaveta Lihacheva, the head of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (one of the main repositories of European trophy art), who publicly defended the GULAG museum and Romanov, was herself fired two months later.

There are rumors that the GULAG museum will be reopened in 2026 under a new head. But it will have to be careful: historical and memory activities are subject to state assessment. The human rights organization Memorial is banned. The annual remembrance day for victims of the Great Purge is banned. Artists get arrested and imprisoned for calling the war a war.

Mikhail Piotrovsky in March issued a lengthy document stating that the mission of all Russian museums is to educate “feelings of loyalty and love for the Homeland through immersion in native culture and national history.” And the cultural council of the Investigative Committee will be there to make sure everyone is immersing themselves in it in the right way.

Yegor Mostovshikov is a journalist and a narrative therapist. He was Milena Jesenská Fellow at the IWM in 2025.