The Preserve it for Russia exhibition has been opened in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

      The exposition consists of works provided from the collection of the Russian Culture and History Museum in Prague. It was opened 80 years ago by the emigrants who left Russia after the October revolution. The museum organizers collected these paintings created between the two world wars in order to preserve and return them to Russia in future.

      The museum director writer was Valentin Bulgakov, who worked as a personal assistant to Leo Tolstoy and later was expatriated from the Soviet Union.

      The organizers had no money, and so artists just gave away almost all of these paintings to the museum. In this way they managed to collect several hundred art works, including those by Zinaida Serebryakova, Natalya Goncharova, Nicholas Roerich, Ivan Bilibin, and others.

      The museum worked in Prague till 1944 and then its entire collection was returned to the Soviet Union. Subsequently the collection became part of several museums.

      Presently the Tretyakov Gallery has managed to bring together just a small part of this collection.