is it still a museum if no one sees the exhibits?

Last week I read Svetlana Alexievich's heartrending book, Voices from Chernobyl: the oral history of a nuclear disaster.  Alexievich is a journalist who interviewed people involved in Chernobyl--villagers, politicians, physicists, soldiers--for three years, and turned those interviews into the monologues that make up this astonishing book.  It's something everyone should read., and it details how little most people in Belarus knew about the dangers of radiation, and how little the government did to inform them.

One of the things that struck me most was an interview with Sergei Vasilyevich Sobolev, who discussed how the Soviet mindset contributed to the deception because they lied to themselves as much as the government lied to them.  In 1996, when the interview was recorded, Sobolev was gathering artifacts for a Chernobyl Museum.  It doesn't seem to be the official museum in Kiev, as he references an artifact there as being different than what he has, and I can't track much else down about either his Chernobyl Museum or Sergei Vasilyevich Sobolev himself.  But here's what he said that struck me the most:

"Now do you understand how I see our museum?  In that urn there is some land from Chernobyl. A handful.  And there's a miner's helmet.  Also from there.  Some farmer's equipment from the Zone.  We can't let dosimeters in here--we're glowing!  But everything here needs to be real.  No plaster casts.  People need to believe us.  And they'll only believe the real thing, because there are too many lies around Chernobyl.  There were and there are still."  (Alexievich 138)

Excerpted here it doesn't carry the weight it does as a part of the whole text, but I find myself both sympathetic and torn.  Learning how many people sacrificed their lives (and their health, and the health of their children and loved ones) without realizing what they were doing I understand the deep need for authenticity.  But that same authenticity almost certainly assure that your museum can only be visited by people who either still don't believe the radiation is dangerous or who are already so affected by it that wandering around rooms full of highly radioactive artifacts won't do them any more harm.

And this all gets to a deeper question, one that's not so far away from the old puzzler, 'If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?'  Is it enough for a museum to preserve history even if no one visits it?  Is a museum the collection of artifacts, or the collective experience of seeing the artifacts and learning the history?  The museum Sobolev describes certainly has an authenticity that the official museum in Kiev seems to lack, but if that authenticity comes at the cost of outsiders being able to begin to understand the experience, is it worth it?  Perhaps just knowing such a place exists is enough, perhaps that knowledge automatically balances what may be a less "real" exhibit, but it's hard to say.

Regardless of this existential puzzle, you should go read Voices from Chernobyl immediately.