MVK Polar Museum in the North

Source: "Komsomolskaya Pravda" newspaper.

The stem of the thermometer is shrinking. The spiky arctic wind is scolding the face. Receding ice hummocks are blending with the boundless vastness of the sky. A cello is filling the freezing silence with a charming tune. The snowflakes are dancing and sparkling in the sun in unison with the melody. “A cello at the North Pole!? That’s fun, but it’s crazy,” you’d say. Crazy or not, it did happen, for Man is the one who dreams and the one who makes his dreams come true. There is nothing crazy about that.

Alexey Shaburov, Director General of MVK, the International Exhibition Company, is one of those guys who can really do whatever they wish, giving birth to projects that would appear unreal and attaching a special message to every one of them. He was the man who had come up with the idea of the Mobile Polar Museum in the context of the International Polar Year. The museum, inaugurated in the most mysterious location on Earth, i.e. at the North Pole, is dedicated to the legendary four Soviet polar explorers led by Ivan Papanin and the heroic flight across the North Pole by Valery Chkalov and Mikhail Gromov.

Seventy years later, the MVK team repeated the historic route. The team comprised twenty-five people of totally different vocations and hobbies united by a single dream. They opened the museum’s first exhibition at the exact spot where Otto Schmidt and the Papanin team had set up the first polar station seventy years ago. The core of the exposition was an exact copy of Papanin’s tent. Denis Shapovalov, Mstislav Rostropovich’s apprentice, gave a live performance to honour the occasion.

Later on, the Mobile Polar Museum toured around the largest exhibitions of Moscow, Yekaterinburg, and Rostov-on-Don reaping unheard-of success everywhere it went with an audience of over four hundred thousand eager people who were storming the exhibition during the relatively short fixed event period compared to the average of seventy thousand per year. The exposition featured around three thousand unique exhibits, historical evidence of the Great Conquering of the North Pole: explorers’ personal belongings, photo and video footage provided by Russian museums, relatives, and private collectors. Some of the items on display accompanied deep-sea explorers to the floor of the Arctic Ocean at the depth of 4 261 metres as part of the Arctic 2007 expedition into the high latitudes and traveled to the NP-35 floating station. MVK also published the 1937 newspaper issues telling the story of arctic exploration and its heroes: Otto Schmidt, Valery Chkalov, Mikhail Gromov, Ivan Papanin, and Mikhail Vodopyanov. On the basis of these materials, a special course aimed to study the history of Arctic exploration was introduced in a number of Russian schools.

The Mobile Polar Museum became without exaggeration a link between the past, present, and future; it was visited by many young people and children who could meet real polar explorers face to face and ask them some questions. As it turned out, our pragmatic age still harbours young hearts stirring at the mention of Russia’s heroic past. Every kid wants to be a hero! “Our mission is to instill love for these harsh lands into the younger generation,” Alexey Shaburov, the Project Author, believes. “It is essential, that today’s schoolchildren should come and settle up there, in the North. We have no doubt that our work will be a powerful incentive for the kids to become researchers, arctic lab staff, builders, aviators, and sailors. For the Arctic would welcome and need any highly-qualified professional.”

On December 4th, Crocus Expo hosted the Mobile Polar Museum’s exposition featuring the Arctic Gallery, the core theme of the project comprising hundreds of photographs telling the story of the heroic exploration of the Arctic from the NP-1 to NP-35 polar stations. For more information on the Mobile Polar Museum, go to: www.mvk.ru.

The story of the Mobile Polar Museum as the story of the North exploration is not over for they are truly timeless and boundless. The museum, like the North, will live on, provoking new bold ideas. “The North Pole is a shock. It’s a sort of energy source that can charge anyone who comes there with beautiful ideas and emotions that would certainly be transformed into the new projects that are yet to come,” Alexey Shaburov, MVK Director General believes.

Source: "Komsomolskaya Pravda" newspaper.