About Pushkin House

Pushkin House, established in 1954 during the Cold War, is an independent registered charity and a dynamic arts organisation that critically explores Russian culture and provides a platform for artists and creative practitioners from Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Our exhibitions, community engagement and public programming across history, literature, music and performance focus on themes of identity, citizenship, migration, displacement and belonging. While the original endowment set up more than half a century ago ensures its independence, Pushkin House relies on ticket sales, public grants and donations to sustain our high quality programming.

Frames of Influence

In the theatre of politics, images are some of the most important actors. Through a carefully composed aesthetic, the USSR sought to present itself as a modern, socially productive and technologically dominant society – one whose values and achievements could be admired beyond its borders.

In "Frames of Influence" we present a selection of ‘Thaw-era’ photographs that, unlike the staged assemblages of socialist realism, offer a more humanistic vision into everyday life in the USSR. The photographic medium lends an air of authenticity that blurs the line between propaganda and lived experience. Yet, these photographs also reflect the process by which the individual achievements of the masses were absorbed into the construction of the USSR’s new national identity – a remobilisation of “great culture” as the ideological vehicle of a revised form of empire.

Between 1960 and 1964, Pushkin House corresponded with the USSR–Great Britain Society in Moscow – one of a large number of ‘Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Cooperation with Foreign Countries’ (SSOD). The Friendship Societies were both a valuable forum for facilitating interpersonal dialogue and cultural exchanges across the Iron Curtain, and a government backed outlet for the covert dispensation of cultural propaganda.

As part of this exchange, packages of photographs arrived in London, depicting everything from factory workers and ballerinas, to Olympic athletes and historical monuments. For Open House Festival 2025, we draw on our extensive archive of photographs to present "Frames of Influence", curated by Madeleine Dale. As we critically reflect on our history we invite you to explore the visual rhetoric through which international perceptions of the USSR were managed and, considering the complications and possibilities of cultural communication in both a ‘Cold War’ context, and today, asking: can culture be dislocated from its perceived state ownership?

The display is free and open to the public everyday during the working hours of Pushkin House.

Guided Tours

During Open House Festival 2025 we invite you on a guided tour around our 18th-century building, as well as for a meeting with our team, who will help visitors to engage with the archival materials and provide a deeper explanation of Pushkin House's history, as well its activities in the present.

We will run two sessions on Tuesday 16 September starting at 5pm and 6pm and on Saturday 20 September at 2pm and 3pm; attendance is free and open to all, but booking is essential.

Architecture

Pushkin House's building was designed by Henry Flitcroft (1697–1769) who favoured the Palladian style, emphasising classical features of order and symmetry. His best-known commission, designed on a monumental scale, was Woburn Abbey, stately home of the Duke of Bedford. Flitcroft was much more modest in Bloomsbury; those street-front railings have a touch of class, but the panelled front door, with two narrow “attendant” windows, looks slim and spare. Again, on the first floor, two narrow lights flank the main round-headed window. The second floor has a Diocletian window, semi-circular, with two vertical mullions, continuing the tripartite theme.

Inside the house, the striking feature of the entrance hall is the pair of classical pillars marking off the stairwell. The hall is exactly the same width as the central section of the façade. Some of the ground floor rooms have original woodwork and plaster decorations. We have more detailed information about the architecture of the House available for our visitors.