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Episode details

World Service,12 Jan 2016,9 mins

Russia's Forbidden Art

Witness History

Available for over a year

Fifty years ago, a Russian painter and archaeologist, Igor Savitsky, created a museum in the remote desert of Uzbekistan, where he stored tens of thousands of works of art that he had saved from Stalin's censors. The Savitsky museum, in Nukus, would come to be recognised as one of the greatest collections of Russian avant-garde art in the world. Witness talks to the son and grandson of one of the artists, Alexander Volkov, whose work Savitsky saved. (Photo:the Karakalpak Museum of Art, home of the Savitsky art collection. Credit: Chip HIRES/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

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