Seeing Treasures from Imperial Russia While You Visit Mexico City

Think more than tortillas, salsa dancing and the Zocalo when you go to Mexico City. Along with the impressive artifacts on display from the old Mexican cultures, the National Museum of Anthropology in Chapultepec Park usually offers up a second world class exhibit.

At the moment and into April, the museum is featuring a sweeping look at the world of the last Russian Czars, the time of the Romanovs. The exhibit, called Zares in Spanish, is much more than Faberge eggs; it is a triumph of collaboration between Mexican museum specialists and the cultural section of the Russian Embassy in Mexico. Working together, they have organized treasures lent by Russia's famous Hermitage Museum into a fascinating whole. Let's face it. Seeing them in Mexico is more economical than traveling to Russia!

As an introduction, the exhibit has other advantages too. It is less overwhelming than a visit to the Hermitage itself and is multi-media in the best sense of the term. Before visitors enter the exhibit proper, they can watch two videos bringing reality and fantasy close. One shows black and white documentary footage of the uprisings during the last years of the Czars. An equally compelling video shows the many movie treatments (with actors as different as Danny Kaye and Marlon Brando) woven from the true life telenovela of the Imperial family.

On going through the door, the museum visitor enters a room dominated by two lavishly decorated sleighs against a virtual backdrop of a sleigh traveling through snowy hills. The principal sleigh, with its fur-trimmed robe was actually used by the imperial family. After that, the exhibit proceeds chronologically, starting with the pre-Romanov years to show the Russian Orthodox Church as a major support of the Czars.

Moving through room after room, visitors are marveling at the power of a government that could live on such a scale: an enormous Winter Palace with all its furnishings, presentation pieces made of gold and precious stones, table settings for hundreds, elegant clothing, Peter the Great's collection of tools and scientific instruments. At the same time, the exhibit implies the class hatred that eventually exploded as the Russian Revolution.

Although museum-goers can sense the individual Czars, their consorts, and children as human beings, Zares is organized along broader themes. Americans will see that Alexander II freed the Russian serfs during the 1860s when slavery was ending in the United States The Czars' efforts to expand the Russian empire, both successful and unsuccessful, also show up clearly.

Life-sized cardboard cutouts of the Romanovs before the entrance advise the visitor to pick and choose rather than trying to absorb everything. Mexican visitors are doing just that. Other history buffs willing to risk two hours away from tourist Mexico may find Zares a highlight of a Mexico City stay.

Admission to Zares is 51 pesos, less than US$4 at the current exchange rate. Audio guides in English are available at additional cost. The museum, like most in Mexico and elsewhere, opens Tuesday through Sunday.

Sources: Booklet accompanying the exhibit; personal knowledge