{"id":398,"date":"2026-01-30T13:44:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T10:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/?p=398"},"modified":"2026-03-03T13:47:41","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T10:47:41","slug":"art-gold-and-putin-regime-loyalists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/new-nobility\/art-gold-and-putin-regime-loyalists\/","title":{"rendered":"Art, Gold, and Putin Regime Loyalists"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Andrei Soldatov, Irina Borogan<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For art-loving Muscovites, the choice has always been simple. If you admire Russian artists, you go to the\u202fTretyakov Gallery, which looks like a giant Russian terem<\/em><\/a> and houses the largest collection of Russian art in Moscow.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you prefer European painting, you go to\u00a0the \u202fPushkin Museum of Fine Arts<\/a>,\u00a0designed in the Greek classical\u00a0style\u00a0it has the\u00a0largest\u00a0collection of Western art in the capital.\u00a0Both places are sacred to those who spent cold, dark winter weekends there as children\u00a0\u2014\u00a0and developed a habit of always returning.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In mid-January, Ekaterina Pronicheva, the 48-year-old daughter of a prominent FSB general, was appointed the new director of the Pushkin Museum. The same day, her younger sister Elena, 42 years old, resigned as a director of\u202fthe\u202fTretyakov Gallery. Even by Russian standards, the fact that two daughters of an FSB general had been in charge of Moscow\u2019s two most important museums was extraordinary. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vladimir Pronichev, their father, is not just any old FSB officer. A veteran of the KGB special forces with a combat record in Afghanistan, he made his career breakthrough in the mid-1990s, when he was appointed to head the FSB department in Karelia, a region bordering Finland, replacing Nikolai Patrushev, Putin\u2019s close friend and ally. Soon afterwards, Patrushev took him to Moscow, and once Putin became FSB director in 1998, he made Pronichev his deputy in charge of counterterrorism \u2014 easily the agency\u2019s most challenging job at a time of serious political violence.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was Pronichev who supervised the disastrous FSB-led operation<\/a> to free hostages in 2002 at Moscow\u2019s Dubrovka theater, taken hostage by a group of Chechen militants, which ended with more than 130 hostages dead from poisonous gas pumped into the auditorium by the special forces. He also supervised the similarly disastrous<\/a> 2004 FSB operation at a school in Beslan, which left more than 300 people dead, most of them children. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this prevented Vladimir Putin from promoting Pronichev to General of the Army \u2014 the second-highest military rank, equivalent to a US four-star general. It was a remarkable achievement. In the 1990s, the rank was a rare mark of prestige: not all FSB directors received it, and Putin himself had never reached that level while serving as FSB chief. Pronichev retired in 2013 but remained one of the most decorated and respected generals of Putin\u2019s favored agency. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That standing undoubtedly aided the careers of his daughters in Moscow\u2019s cultural world, where major institutions, from theaters to museums, are state-controlled and senior appointments are made either by the mayor or by the Ministry of Culture. This is why the news about the women\u2019s careers was announced by Olga Lyubimova, Russia\u2019s minister of culture, and one of the protagonists of our book Our Dear Friends in Moscow<\/em><\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dominance of the FSB general\u2019s daughters in Moscow\u2019s cultural field stretches back nearly 15 years. Ekaterina Pronicheva was first appointed deputy head of the Moscow City Government\u2019s Department of Culture, a position that gave her oversight of funding for museums, theaters, and festivals. She then took a senior role at the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy, a vast and generously funded showcase of Soviet accomplishment \u2014 from agriculture to space \u2014 founded by Stalin to impress capitalist competitors. Her next position, as a director of the Museum of White Monuments of Vladimir and Suzdal (the oldest Russian cathedrals and churches), provided another signal that she had the Kremlin\u2019s favor.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her January promotion is different and takes her to a vertiginous level in Russia\u2019s cultural firmament. Among all Moscow\u2019s cultural institutions, the Pushkin stands apart. The museum, which houses one of Russia\u2019s most impressive collections of European art,\u202fwas founded in 1912 by the father of the famous Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva and became beloved by the public for its connection to European history, from Ancient Greece to the Italian Renaissance. It provided an affordable window into Western culture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet the Pushkin is not only about the distant past. In post-Soviet Russia, it found itself in the international spotlight. For more than 30 years, attention has focused on the shameful origins of the collection known as Schliemann\u2019s Gold \u2014 more than 200 items, including jewelry, vessels, and weapons discovered in the late 19th<\/sup> century by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann at the site of ancient Troy, in modern-day Turkey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That collection was captured by the Soviet Army and taken as booty from Berlin to the Soviet Union in 1945, and was kept hidden in the storerooms of the Pushkin for many decades, until its exposure by courageous museum employees in the early 1990s. Today, it remains a subject of international dispute, with Germany and Turkey demanding its return. The Russian stance, now that the collection\u2019s presence in Moscow can no longer be denied, is defiance, and the items are displayed<\/a> on the Pushkin Museum\u2019s website.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the fall, the issue returned to the national conversation with the publication of Pushkin director Irina Antonova\u2019s biography<\/a>, by bestselling Russian author Lev Danilkin.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Antonova, who led the museum for more than 50 years, played an active role in concealing the Schliemann collection. Danilkin\u2019s book was praised by many intellectuals, but outraged Russian nationalists and Kremlin propagandists angered that the subject was being discussed in depth for the first time since the 1990s. They remain convinced that taking art objects as war trophies was completely justified by Russia\u2019s suffering during the war.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a result, throughout the autumn, Moscow society debated the Pushkin Museum\u2019s complicity in hiding art stolen after the war \u2014 a subject that sounds strikingly contemporary in the context of Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine, where cultural artefacts have been stolen<\/a>. It was yet another example of the Russians speaking about the past as a way to address the sensitivities of the present while bypassing strict censorship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As always, the regime responded in the way it knows best \u2014 by appointing an arch loyalist who can be relied on to do the \u201cright\u201d thing. The\u00a0Ministry of Culture decided that\u00a0no one\u00a0but the daughter of a prominent FSB general could be entrusted with running the country\u2019s most Western-oriented museum during wartime. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Originally published on the CEPA website<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Agentura.ru 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In mid-January,\u00a0Ekaterina\u00a0Pronicheva,\u00a0the\u00a048-year-old\u00a0daughter of a prominent FSB general,\u00a0was\u00a0appointed\u00a0the new director of the Pushkin Museum.\u00a0The\u00a0same day,\u00a0her younger sister Elena, 42 years old,\u00a0resigned as\u00a0a director\u00a0of\u202fthe\u202fTretyakov Gallery. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-nobility"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":400,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions\/400"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentura.ru\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}