Kunaev Apartment Museum
Every museum has a theme of some sort and after viewing a few exhibits sections, I begin to better grasp the overall structure and orient myself based on the curator’s thinking. The Kunaev living apartment museum was a bit of a challenge for me.
Kunaev was the President of Kazakhstan Soviet Socialist Republic for most of the Soviet period. He was from Kazakhstan (Senior Zhuz presumably, for those who can relate to Kazakhstan ethnicity) and he governed the SSR for most of the Soviet era. His apartment in Almaty was comparatively very modest.
The apartment museum exhibits are arranged as they were when he and his wife lived in it. Most of the exhibits are gifts from the foreign dignitaries. Of course, he arranged them in his apartment showcases per his liking. For example, he liked cigarettes lighters and a couple of shelves are full of them. The challenge is that as a viewer, I am not as interested in seeing the lighter collection for the sake of it. What is more interesting is to learn who gave them to him. What’s also amusing from my point of view is that his arrangement is very much incongruous in that respect.
Kunaev received gifts from the heads of state and other dignitaries of the era. The theme of the museum, therefore, is the Cold War Soviet period with the set of characters and world politics of the time. He received gifts from JFK, Indira Gandhi, Fidel Castro, Sadam Hussain, Ho Chi Min, Shah Reza Pallavi, etc. One must therefore reconstruct the history of the period in his mind to better appreciate the exhibits, while ignoring the fact that the cigarette lighter given by Sadam Hussain with his own picture on it is in the same showcase with lighters given by JFK. History doesn’t change itself, but our interpretation of it changes.
Apart from the significance of who gave those gift items, it’s also fascinating to learn what objects those gift givers thought as worthy of gifts from their own country and represented their own culture. It’s not surprising that the gifts from the US were dominated by the symbols of Liberty: Statue of Lincoln, Liberty Bell, Washington Monument etc. Taj Mahal and an elaborately carved wooden side table are gifts from Indira Gandhi.
