framing, bindings, carpentry, and so forth, with a corresponding technical personnel at their service.
As regards protection of art objects and relics of the past the first and immediate problem of the Section is the drawing of regulations designed to thwart the export of art treasures from the territory of the Russian Republic.
The drawing up of such legislative measures though incomplete and, so to say, temporary, should be immediately commenced by the Section in order to safeguard the country's art treasures which are threatened to forever disappear abroad.
Next to this must be instituted a careful scientific account and description of these treasures, without which—as the State Museum policy of Italy has shown—the realization of the aforesaid problems cannot be accomplished.
Those institutions and persons who are in possession of collections of great cultural value will receive from the Section projective charters.
Flying detachments will be dispatched to the localities in order to bring about an actual control of the "disappearing" art valuables from the provinces. An instruction concerning protection shall be drawn up. The Section shall protect not only State and public museums, but also all private collections in so far as they present a State-wide interest.
Finally, its most important function, without which it would, generally speaking, be impossible to realize a State-wide program for a Museum Policy, will be its contact with the province. The Section will effect a close contact with the local organs, propose the organization of local organs of analogous functions, thus creating throughout Russia a net of cultural institutions which shall actually carry through in life the instructions of the central directing organ at the People’s Commissariat of Education.
Already prior to the official establishment of the Collegium in charge of museums and preservation of art objects and relics of the past, the question of nationalization of the Tretiakov Gallery had been discussed at the initiative of the present Collegium's membership.
For a long time a contradiction was apparent between the formal status of the Gallery as a regional-municipal art treasury and the all-Russian artistic and scientific reputation it has long52
