Soviet Open Air Museum of Petru Costin – near Chișinău – Moldova

Posted on 15/11/2025 by Michael

Soviet Open Air Museum of Petru Costin

Soviet Open Air Museum of Petru Costin – near Chișinău – Moldova

This is the outside companion piece to the Petru Costin Gallery in Ialoveni. It is home to those artefacts (including a small plane and a couple of helicopters) that were either designed to be placed in the open air or are too big to be inside the gallery.

There’s a description of many of the items – so you can know who is actually represented and also at times an indication of where they came from, when and why they were removed. However, there’s no information on how they ended up in a field on the side of a valley in central Moldova.

There’s only one image of JV Stalin and that has been heavily vandalised. This initial attack would have taken place in the early 1960s (I would imagine) but it remained otherwise intact for the next 30 years during the period of Revisionist control of the first worker’s state. Where? It’s not known.

Not surprisingly there are many statues/busts of VI Lenin but amongst the collection there are also one or two surprises. There’s a head and shoulders of both a young and an older Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife. There’s a bust of Yuri Gagarin, the first man into space, who I would have thought would have survived the collapse of the Soviet Union as he represented a Russian as well as a Soviet achievement. Also, not a surprise, is the presence of a number of images of FE Dzerzhinsky (‘Iron Felix’), the first head of the Cheka.

YM Sverdlov, barely lived for two years after the October Revolution as he succumbed to the ‘Spanish’ flu pandemic in 1919 (a matter that rarely gets mentioned in histories of the Revolution but which must have had an impact on both sides in the Civil War/War of Intervention. There are a couple of busts of SM Kirov, the leader of the Bolsheviks in Leningrad who was assassinated in 1934. Military leaders are also represented, including VI Chapayev and MV Frunze, who both played a crucial role in the war to protect the Revolution during the Civil War against the White, reactionary forces.

There’s a couple of busts of Karl Marx but Frederick Engels isn’t represented. There are also a couple of statues of MI Kalinin, the Soviet President for just under 20 years – one of which doesn’t quite look right. The large, headless red torso is almost certainly that of JV Stalin – it has his classic stance. The whole statue must have been immense but there’s no more information about where it might have stood. It’s only speculation (based only on its size) that it might be what remains of the statue that stood at the entrance to the Volga-Don Canal, a little south of Stalingrad, which was replaced by a statue of VI Lenin.

There were also some statues – and pieces of statues – which wouldn’t have been controversial but had just, presumably, become ‘unloved’, or were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This statue park is similar to the Park of the Fallen/Muzeon Art Park in Moscow, the Museum of Socialist Art – Sofia and Memento Park close to Budapest.

Location;

2J94+54 Scoreni

That doesn’t look like an address but if you put it into a map search it will get you there.

How to get there;

This is a very unfriendly public transport location. The museum is about 5 km north-west of the town of Suruceni and the museum itself is along a dirt road just under a kilometre from the main road. It goes downhill (steeply) which means it comes up hill even more steeply. Consider the option of talking to Natalia at the Petru Costin Gallery in Ialoveni. It might turn out a bit more expensive but it will get you there much easier.

GPS;

47.01796 N

28.60530 E

Petru Costin Gallery – Ialoveni – Moldova

Posted on 15/11/2025 by Michael

Petru Costin Gallery – Ialoveni

Petru Costin Gallery – Ialoveni – Moldova

This gallery in a small town just on the edge of Chișinău (full official name Galeria colecțiilor Petru Costin a consiliului raional Ialoveni) is a strange place.

Housed in what was a school for special needs children before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 this four story ‘museum’ is certainly unique. Petru Costin was a Romanian Customs Official and hoarder. He collected anything and everything from Moldova during the Socialist period – together with some earlier religious works.

It’s not really curated in the sense you would expect in a ‘normal’ museum which makes visiting some of the rooms overwhelming. There’s little in the way of description of most of the articles and missing dates on some items makes if difficult to recognise any development in the technology, for example, in the electrical equipment rooms.

Although there are items related to the decoration and propaganda produced in the Soviet Union, for example, many hundreds of enamel badges in one of the first floor rooms – but surprisingly no badges of VI Lenin (unless I missed them in the general chaos) – those especially interested in such material have to wait until you are taken to the very last room on the ground floor.

This would have originally have been the school’s assembly hall and is the largest single room in the building. It’s packed with statues, busts, paintings, banners, pendants and general ‘memorabilia’ from the Soviet era. Although there has been some element of organisation of the material there is so much, and so little space, that the curator just seems to have eventually given up.

That’s a shame. We know that all museums have much more material than they have on public display (I read recently an article where the V and A Museum in London is trying to make more of its collection ‘in storage’ available to the general public) but the decision in this gallery is to make everything available on show – even if it means it’s difficult to properly see and appreciate what’s there. I suppose the only solution would be more space – but that would provide its own problems.

Most museums have so much to see that you end up missing some of the most interesting items – not seeing the wood for the trees. And that’s even more the case here.

I didn’t even make a start on counting the images of VI Lenin, both in statuary and in other forms. JV Stalin makes a number of appearances followed, in number, by images of FE Dzerzhinsky, I understand both Lenin and Stalin and I can appreciate the role ‘Iron Felix’ played in the early defence of the Revolution but I have never been able to work out exactly why (amongst some of the other important Bolshevik leaders of the 1920s and 30s) he seemed to be so respected by so many of the Soviet population – even into the Revisionist period.

The slide show below aims to pick out some detail from the chaos – perhaps a second visit might be warranted to discover what I might have missed the first time.

Location;

Strada Stefan cel Mare 4, Ialoveni

Telephone;

373 (0)69294556

GPS;

46.95136 N

28.78376 E

How to get there;

Trolleybus No 36 (destination Ialoveni) heading south-east down Boulevard Stefan cel Mare in Chișinău will take you within a few minutes walk of the gallery. Get off just before the roundabout at the bottom of the very long hill. Be careful if you return to Chișinău on the no. 36. The second half of the return route is completely different from the outward and you end up close to the Triumphal Arch by the back way.

Cost is 10 leu (6 leu for Chișinău and 4 leu for Ialoveni).

The matrushka No. 35, from the Central Bus Station, will also take you there.

Website – in Romanian only;

A companion piece to the internal gallery (and well worth the effort of visiting) is the Petru Costin Open Air Museum (see the separate page on this blog for what is on display there) but this is not easy if you are dependent on public transport. One of the best options is to talk to (the English speaking) Natalia at the Gallery. She can arrange for one of the local volunteers (or a local taxi driver) to take you there, wait whilst you walk around the site and bring you back to Ialoveni. Cost around 400 leu/€20.

Agricultural bas reliefs – Valea Morilor Park – Chișinău – Moldova

Posted on 11/11/2025 by Michael

Bas relief at the Valea Morilor Park, Chișinău

Agricultural bas reliefs – Valea Morilor Park – Chișinău – Moldova

There’s a limited amount of Soviet decoration still visible in Moldova and only one example of this art work in the form of bas reliefs (so far) in Chișinău, the capital of the country.

This is on the façade of a building which is now some banal events venue but which must have had a more official function in the Soviet past.

What we have here are two tableau depicting agricultural, collective farm, life during the period of the construction of Socialism in the Soviet Union.

These are very reminiscent of the images that can be seen on the external walls of the Republic pavilions at the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy (VDNKh) in Moscow, but I didn’t – at the time of my visit – note exactly what images were representing which Republic.

What we have in all such bas reliefs is a respectful representation of working people, productive and working not just for themselves but for the benefit of the collective. We have men, women and children all involved in the productive process from which all will receive the awards and not having the fruits of their labour stolen by the capitalist owners of the means of production. There was a time when the workers of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) had the reins of power in their hands. The fact that they allowed those reins get into the hands of the exploiting class following the death of Comrade Stalin (in 1953) is, for the sake of this discussion, irrelevant. For a time they had the power – why they allowed that power to be taken away from them is an important matter but not something which can be covered here. (That ‘debate’ is available on other pages of this blog.)

In these images there’s always a gentle relationship between the collective farmers and the animals they tend. This would always be an idyllic representation. Farm life, when it comes to livestock, is invariably cruel. The animals are there for one reason – that it to be exploited for what they can produce whilst alive and to provide protein on their deaths. But even though that would have been the reality on any Soviet State/collective farm it would have lacked the industrial slaughter that exists under capitalist food, factory production process. I don’t want to romanticise Soviet agriculture but I don’t believe it ever reached the level that was already a long established norm in the ‘killing fields’ of the like of the Chicago stock yards as was depicted in Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’. In that capitalist environment it was (and is?) difficult to work out who was the more abused, the animals or the human workers.

Whether that situation would have arisen even if revisionism and the restoration of capitalism had not occurred in the Soviet Union is a moot point. Whatever the future might have been the past of a gentile relationship between man and animal is still preserved in the bas reliefs on the building close by the Valea Morilor Lake in Chișinău.

These images also tell the history of the country, in that those agricultural products that were important in the country in the 1960s/70s (when I assume the bas reliefs were produced) are there on the wall – the grapes (for the wine), the sunflowers (for the oil), the maize (for the cobs) and wheat (for the flour).

Somewhat surprising (to me) is the lack of a significant reference to industry. The unique representation is in a male with spanner. No mechanisation, no tractor/combine harvester in the imagery, no indication that agricultural production was moving away from a situation of ‘idiocy of rural life’. This is not meant as a criticism of the skills of agricultural workers but of the fact that their working life had traditionally led them to an existence of isolation and a lack of organisation which was forced upon industrial workers with the development of factories and the concentration of hundreds (and thousands) of workers in a restricted area. They wouldn’t have chosen that move if given free will – they would have preferred working in a ‘cottage industry’ with their cow, pig and chickens on common land and a small vegetable patch – but that was stolen from working people by the first major privatisation of the modern age with the Enclosure Acts (where the rich stole from the poor in a blatant act of ‘legalised’ theft).

So these public works of art told a part of the history of the common people in Socialist societies. When they were/are obliterated in a purge of the past because capitalism doesn’t want the working class to even remember what the construction of Socialism (with the potential to lead to Communism) had meant to their lives then they will just accept the ‘norm’ that capitalism offers – to stay in your place, to accept what is given and allow the billionaires to rake in unbelievable amounts of wealth whilst the poor get poorer and as their ranks are increased.

That is why the images of Socialist Realism are being destroyed and, in an attempt to combat that revision of history, why that imagery that remains is being documented on the pages of this blog.

If you head to the lakeside to see these bas reliefs then you cannot but avoid also visiting the tableau of the three outstanding Communists – Karl Marx, VI Lenin and Georgi Dimitrov.