From party control to the art museum: an icon-painter Bolshevik
At 11 he left his village to apprentice as a painter; at 16 he was painting icons under a master. Twenty years later, those same hands held the cadre lists of the party's central apparatus.
Born to a peasant family in Vladimir province, he was apprenticed at age 11 and mastered icon painting before joining the Bolsheviks in 1905 at twenty. After the Civil War he led the party organization in the Ivanovo-Voznesensk region; in 1923 he rose to head the Organizational-Instruction Department of the Central Committee, managing the cadre-appointment line during Stalin's early consolidation of the party machine and serving as a candidate member of the Orgburo. He then spent fifteen years in the Central Control Commission and Party Control Commission, including through the apparatus purges of the Great Terror, and after a brief removal from duty in 1939 became director of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, a post he held until his retirement in 1944.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1905Joined RSDRP, participated in the 1905–07 revolution in Ivanovo-Voznesensk
- 1913–16Arrested and exiled
- 1917Member of Yaroslavl RSDRP(b) Committee
- 1918–21Chairman of Teykovo uyezd party committee and executive committee, deputy chairman of Ivanovo-Voznesensk provincial executive committee, then provincial party secretary
- 1922–24Member of CC RKP(b)
- 1923–24Head of Organizational-Instruction Department, CC; candidate member of Orgburo
- 1924–34Member of TsKK Presidium
- 1934–39Member of Party Control Commission
- 1939–44Director of Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts
- 1944Retired
Related historical events
War, evacuation and a split tenure: directing the Pushkin Museum, 1939-1944
Removed from duty for several months in 1939, Korotkov was appointed that year as director of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. He held the post until 1944, but not continuously. The museum's own list of its directors records two separate terms, 1939-1941 and 1942-1944, with the art historian Vera Nikolaevna Krylova serving as acting director in the interval of 1941-1942.
The period coincided with the Soviet-German war. When the war began, the museum's collections were evacuated to Novosibirsk and Solikamsk. During the fighting for Moscow the museum building was badly damaged by bombing, and reconstruction began in 1944 and lasted several years. Korotkov himself spent some time in Novosibirsk, where the evacuated valuables were kept, and returned to Moscow after the war.
What stands out in this career is that his appointment as director derived from his record as a party cadre rather than from art-historical expertise, and that his tenure was cut in two by the wartime situation. After Korotkov retired in 1944 the museum was led by Sergei Merkurov, who opened the first postwar permanent exhibition on 3 October 1946.