Ivan Filatov

History of the Village of Izhevskoye. 1890s – 1930s

IVAN FILATOV

History of the Village of Izhevskoye. 1890s – 1930s 

Curators: Anna Zaitseva, Maria Lavrova
Attribution and text preparation: Nikita Girin, Dmitry Gorbach, Sergey Pogonin, Dmitry Filippov, Margarita Nikolaeva, Nina Potapenko 

As part of the strategic programme ‘History of Russia in Photographs’, the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow presents the exhibition ‘Ivan Filatov. History of the Village of Izhevskoye. 1890s–1930s’. The project is in collaboration with Filatov House, a young institution dedicated to restoring the memory of the remarkable photographer Ivan Filatov (1860–1937). He lived through two eras, the imperial and the Soviet, and documented life in the village of Izhevskoye for nearly half a century.

Izhevskoye became famous for the fact that its peasant residents bought themselves out of serfdom from the landowner Nikolai Demidov in 1832. This occurred 29 years before the abolition of serfdom in the Russian Empire (serfdom was abolished in 1861). Emperor Nicholas I signed this transaction between the peasants and their landowner in June 1832. Simultaneously12,000 people were given their freedom.

By the 1830s the residents of Izhevskoye had already gained extensive experience in self-government, a rare phenomenon for central Russia. Already in the early 19th century the village had its own ‘constitution’ – the ‘Directions for Governance of the Village of Izhevskoye and Its Hamlets’. This document established the rules of public life. For example, the village was governed by a peasant council consisting of six “capable and honest” men, and peasants throughout the volost [administrative district] knew “how much [of the secular sum] was spent, where, and for what”.

Liberated Izhevskoye flourished. The village boasted several brick factories, three parish churches, a model college, three schools, a public bank and an insurance agency. Residents held lavish mass celebrations, opened libraries and their own businesses, organised agricultural courses, and imported calves from Moscow and Switzerland. Their way of life was captured by Ivan Filatov. “His photographs challenge stereotypes about peasant life. In Filatov’s photographs men are clad in fine suits and the women wear fur coats, beautiful dresses and expensive rings,” says Nikita Girin, co-founder of the Filatov House project.

Ivan Filatov was born to the family of a Russian Orthodox missionary. He was first employed as a factory worker, then as an employee of Gryazi railway station in the Lipetsk region. It was there that he became interested in painting and music and taught himself photography. Returning to Izhevskoye in the 1890s, Filatov married Alexandra Druzhinina, the daughter of a merchant. In 1896 he opened a photography studio on the family plot. During his long life Ivan Filatov witnessed tectonic historical and social changes. In the surviving photographs we see the pre-revolutionary rural way of life that continued until the 1930s: wedding festivities, fair trade, work in the fields, and lavish celebrations of Self-Redemption Day. At the same time, Filatov’s images show how village life changed with the advent of the October 1917 Revolution and the subsequent collectivisation. Much of the photographer’s archive consists of group portraits of Izhevskoye residents, allowing us to see how people’s faces and external appearance changed over the decades.

In addition to photography Ivan Filatov took part in social activities. He was part of a “circle of progressive social activists” that achieved the construction of new zemstvo [locally administered] schools, the creation of a consumers’ society, and a volunteer fire brigade. According to the memoirs of Filatov’s granddaughter, fellow villagers considered him “the most educated man of his time”, a true “jack of all trades” who painted beautifully, played various musical instruments, and amused himself with gardening and pyrotechnics (making fireworks, flare guns, etc.). The exhibition features some of Ivan Filatov’s personal belongings, including photography equipment, notebooks with instructions for making sparklers, and a handwritten journal he published while working at the railway station.

In the final years of his life Filatov was assisted by amateur photographer Ivan Mysev, whose photographs also feature in the exhibition. After Ivan Filatov’s death in 1937 Mysev took the glass negatives for safekeeping, but was soon subject to repression and died in a camp in the 1940s. Mysev’s sister Maria continued to preserve the Filatov archive. Her heirs later donated these priceless negatives to the K. E. Tsiolkovsky Museum in Izhevskoye (Izhevskoye is the birthplace of the great Russian scientist and founder of theoretical astronautics, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky), which already housed some of Filatov’s photographs.

Today, enthusiasts from the Filatov House project are restoring the photographer’s house in Izhevskoye and conducting painstaking research to locate and attribute Filatov’s images. They are working with both museum and historical archives to collect the memories of local residents. The exhibition includes many texts that emerged from this work. It is especially important and valuable that, for most of the project participants, researching the history of this unique village is directly related to learning the history of their own families.

Ivan Filatov’s photographs, so carefully collected by the Filatov House team and the residents of Izhevskoye, turn a new page in the photo chronicle of Russia. 

MAMM and the Filatov House would like to thank the following for providing exhibits for the exhibition:

Museum of K. E. Tsiolkovsky in Izhevskoye Village, and personally its director Nikolai Medvedkov and chief curator Olga Mityukova;

Ryazan Historical and Architectural Museum-Reserve, and personally its director Oleg Robinov and deputy director for scientific and educational activities Elena Chumicheva;

Spassky Historical and Archaeological Museum named after G. K. Wagner, and personally its director Marina Yershova;

Olga Bolokhova, Evgenia Gulina, Alexander Kamkin, Tatyana Kiryushina, Tatyana and Yuri Pankin, and Viktor Smirnov.

Filatov House Team: Nikita Girin, Dmitry Gorbach, Sergey Pogonin, Nadezhda Raichenko, Andrei Ptichnikov, Alexei Kolesnikov, Andrei Merkunov, Arina Yemelina