Marina Loshak steps down as director of Moscow’s Pushkin Museum in latest high-level Russian departure

In the latest high-profile museum departure in Russia, Marina Loshak has resigned as director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. She was replaced by Elizaveta Likhacheva, the current director of the Shchusev State Architectural Museum in Moscow.

The ongoing convulsion in the Russian museum world has been linked to ideological repression following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Incidentally, Loshak’s daughter and nephew are both opposition journalists who left Russia after the invasion. Both were classified as “foreign agents” by the Justice Department.

Likhacheva’s appointment comes just weeks after Zelfira Tregulova was expelled from the State Tretyakov Gallery. Tregulova was replaced by Elena Pronicheva, the daughter of a former head of the Federal Security Service linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In 2013, Loshak, who left Odessa, Ukraine for Moscow in 1986, replaced Irina Antonova, who headed the Pushkin Museum for over 50 years. Like Antonova, she was known for organizing major international projects. Most recently she was responsible with the Fondation Louis Vuitton and the State Hermitage Museum for staging exhibitions of the seminal Shchukin and Morozov collections of pre-1917 modernist art – even when they were more difficult and then impossible to organize against the backdrop of the war.

On Tuesday, the Pushkin Museum released a statement by Loshak, attributing to her a long list of accomplishments including digitization, restoration, building expansion, and regional development projects.

“Keep going” is her credo, explained Loshak: “I was the director of the museum for ten years. They need the next person who comes with new energy, with new thoughts and with new ambitions to continue what others have started.”

Likhacheva’s appointment as director of the Shchusev Museum in 2017 was met with protests from some museum employees. A petition was launched in which the employees criticized her for the position, among other things, because of insufficient educational qualifications and management experience.

But she ended her tenure as director with positive reviews for upgrading its facilities, opening up the collection and attracting young visitors. A statement by the Ministry of Culture on her appointment as Pushkin said the number of visitors to the Architecture Museum had quadrupled to 110,000 a year under her leadership.

However, Agentstvo, an investigative news site created by opposition media, reported on Monday that according to leaked tax documents, in the early 2000s Likhacheva had been a staff member of a pro-Kremlin youth movement known for targeting liberal cultural figures.