“This heat has been going on for a month now, there’s no rain, no harvest,” says Natalya Vitalievna Kanivtsova, director of the Rovenki City History Museum, throwing up her hands.
We meet near her house, in the Gagarin quarter, to go to the museum together.
– And it smells like peaches, we cook jam and preserve compotes for the winter. There are peaches and plums this year – see for yourself. You know that peaches are the third most planted fruit in the world. And they have taken root in our region. We are southerners now.
– And there are lots of grapes, – Natalya Vitalievna points to the other side of the street. – It’s a pity that the granddaughters have already left and didn’t get to try them.
Natalia Kanivtsova is a long-time director. She has been a widow for eighteen years, and her son and family live in Rostov-on-Don. Keeping her back straight, she walks down the hot street in a formal dress, explaining: “How can you? I work in a museum, not in a bakery.” She often stops and greets local residents.
Photo: Inna Kharitonova
– This woman just came up to us, imagine, she recently gave a TV to the museum. One of those post-war ones.
For some reason, it is difficult to immediately understand what war Kanivtsova is talking about, because there were many wars in the Luhansk People’s Republic. In the city center, at the memorial complex “Slava”, the heroes of the underground anti-fascist youth organization “Young Guard” are buried – Oleg Koshevoy, Lyubov Shevtsova, Viktor Subbotin, Dmitry Ogurtsov and Semyon Ostapenko, who were shot by the Nazis along with 375 civilians on February 9, 1943 in the Gremuchy Forest.
For many years, at memorial rallies, Rivne residents repeated that there was no longer a place for fascism where every inch of land reminded of the victims in the name of Victory. But, 69 years later, everything has changed. Grief has come to the city again. On August 22, 2014, the Tochka-U tactical missile system destroyed the young Khatynsky family, a five-year-old boy, Sasha Sorokin, and a random passerby, Alexey Polyakov. A three-meter rocket with shrapnel filling, having exploded in the air, blew up the worldview of the city residents, and became the line beyond which another history was bound to begin.
– Look, do you see this hall? It used to be painted yellow and blue from floor to ceiling. All the walls. Although no one cared about the museum, no one had done anything in it for thirty years: no repairs, no re-exposition. They just painted it, as if a layer of enamel could convince of something, – Natalia Kanivtsova conducts a special memory tour of the museum, where she has worked for 17 years, and since 2014 has been the director.
Photo: Inna Kharitonova
– You see, they immediately stopped paying us salaries, pensions, – “they” are those people who did not want to preserve the value of history lessons and began to kill their own citizens. – We were all penniless, but the museum was open, we believed that everything would work out. Not far from here there is the St. Nicholas Church, one of the oldest churches in the city. So we went there, prayed and knew that they would not abandon us.
And so it happened. The museum began to receive systematic assistance. The storage facility, the staff offices, and the exhibition halls were renovated. It became possible to develop museum activities, to work without fear of lack of salary and worry for one’s own families.
– After the events of 2014, no one left the museum for any political reasons. And there was not a single person who would reproach us for repainting the yellow-blue wall. On the contrary, we began to receive more and more visitors every year.
Groups of tourists began to arrive at the Museum of the History of the City of Rovenky: children, adults, young army members. From Donbass and Russia. There were even French and German journalists.
Natalya Vitalievna, having seemingly gotten used to constantly overcoming difficulties, began to understand that everything was finally becoming solvable.
– You drink some tea, take some candy. Recently, after an excursion, one of the visitors brought a whole bag. You know, it’s nice.
Kanivtsova is a hospitable hostess, sensitive and caring. But there is one more person in the museum. This is the cat Chita. The museum keeper, a red Siberian beauty, jealous and not at all affectionate with strangers. She sits on the next chair and looks at me attentively. Chita was brought to the museum as a kitten to rid the cultural institution of mice. The cat grew up, coped with the task and became a permanent caretaker on all excursions. She meets you at the threshold, escorts you into the halls, demands attention.
When in 2023 the federal state historical museum-reserve “Gorki Leninskiye” became the patron of the Museum of the History of the city of Rovenki and sent the first batch of aid for the establishment of a children’s center, it was Chita that met the cargo along with the director.
– We initially doubted that it was possible. Honestly, – says Natalia Vitalievna, – there are so many difficulties. But then I thought, it is symbolic that our museum is located on V.I. Lenin Street, the monument to the founder of the Soviet state is nearby, maybe it will work out. Today we can say that the project under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation in the framework of providing support to museums located in the Lugansk People’s Republic, Donetsk People’s Republic, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions helped us.
Photo: Inna Kharitonova
Especially for the organization of the children’s center in June 2023 and January 2024, the Gorki Leninskiye Museum-Reserve donated furniture for animation classes, tables for sand painting, 3D pens, materials for creative classes, an educational media complex on the history of the Great Patriotic War, televisions, laptops, a portable projector, a screen, an audio speaker, a mixing console, VR glasses, radio microphones – a total of 45 boxes with a total weight of about 170 kg – to the Rovenki city museum.
– I remember very well how the Gorki Leninskikh employees came to us for the first time. They looked around in confusion. Of course, they have a big museum there, large areas, territory. I understood them completely, such a disparity in scale. They looked around. They thought. And then the work began: the artist drew a sketch, the walls were painted, the lamps were screwed in, new furniture was assembled, all sorts of little things.
The perspective on a long focus becomes flat or, to put it simply, the big is seen from a distance. Natalya Vitalievna, opening a new children’s center in the museum in January 2024, could not imagine that after a short time, it would become so popular. She leads to the window to show.
– Look, opposite us is the Gorky Palace of Culture. By the way, you probably don’t know that during the times of Rovenets Sloboda there was a building of “Electro-Biograph”, a cinema opened in 1913. With a buffet where they sold locally produced drinks, for example, “Kalinkinsky Beer and Honey Brewing Company”, the plant of “Artificial Mineral Waters of the City of Rostov-on-Don”. Movie tickets cost from 50 kopecks to a ruble. That’s a lot, expensive, but there were also a lot of people… So, I digress. Despite the fact that the House of Culture is large, children and their parents come to us from there. We have become another cultural center. The educational mission of the museum has acquired a broader meaning. People come to us from art school to draw with sand, because there are no other tables like this in the city. From art school for special classes. We are also the only ones with 3D pens and a cartoon machine. The House of Culture has its own theater, but the bosses gave us a glove theater, which they do not have. So now we have puppet shows for children and adults.
Visitors arrive, and Natalya Vitalyevna conducts a tour. I listen to how the city’s biography begins in the 18th century. Where the museum director lives today, the Chumatsky path used to pass, and salt was transported from the Crimea. Traders stopped for the night at a picturesque moat on the left bank of the river, and the word “moat” gave rise to the name – Rovenets Sloboda.
Recently, one of the regular visitors to the children’s center at the museum made a cartoon about the city with the help of a mentor – Andrey Andreyevich Komissarenko, a leading specialist in the cultural programs department of the Gorki Leninskiye Museum-Reserve, who works permanently in Rovenki. A short story made of plasticine, in which there was a place for salt, a river, war, a city and people who love their native land.
95 years ago, the first electricity and radio station arrived in Rovenki, and railway communication was opened.
90 years ago Rovenki received the status of a city.
Two years ago, on September 30, 2022, four southern regions returned to Russia – the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), as well as the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions.
At the beginning of 2024, Rovenkovo children mastered the technique of animation, which in the context of world history is a very insignificant event. But for one small museum it is very important.
– It is always nice when something takes on a literal embodiment. After all, they say rightly that autumn is the second spring. And so it is with us, the second spring of the museum, – smiles Natalya Vitalievna Kanivtsova, saying goodbye. In the flowerbed, the chrysanthemums and petunias are still blushing, but the first leaves are already flying from the poplars. Smartly dressed schoolgirls run to the museum. Their bows resemble the flowers that the children of Rovenki so often draw in the children’s center of the History Museum.
Source: rg.ru
