A hedgehog from Luxembourg: the story of a specimen as evidence of migrations of museum collections between Kharkiv and Kyiv in the 1930s

Abstract

The history of the formation and migration of natural history collections in Ukraine in the first half of the 20th century is considered on the example of a unique specimen – a hedgehog with the label "Luxembourg" collected in 1932, and on the label is written "Museum named after Artem". The study showed that the specimen represents the species Erinaceus roumanicus, collected by the Kharkiv botanist E. Lavrynenko and the zoologist Panchenko, who worked in the south of Ukraine. Information about this specimen was found in one of the old inventory journals (circa 1935) of the Zoological Museum of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, which is now part of the NMNH of Ukraine. The full reconstructed label information is as follows: "Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Polohy Rayon, Azov railway station near the village Luxembourg Ukrainian, 23/05/1932". This locality is situated 15 km away from the Kamyani Mohyly Reserve, which was most likely the destination of the researchers. According to the author’s reconstruction, the specimen was collected at a railway junction (RS Azov is known as "376 km Junction"), that is, at the place of long train stops in anticipation of passing the oncoming traffic, which was likely to have been the practice of the researchers at that time. The label "Museum named after Artem" should be identified as that belonging to the Kharkiv museum named after Artem (there were museums of the same name in Bakhmut and only since 1950 in Luhansk). An analysis of the movements of scientists, the most important of which took place in 1934–1936 in connection with the transfer of the capital of Ukraine from Kharkiv to Kyiv and the reorganization of a number of institutions, shows that this particular and many other collection specimens were transported to academic institutions in Kyiv. The collectors of this specimen are also the authors of mammal specimens from the Kherson (1928) and Kharkiv regions (1932, 1934); in 1934, Lavrenko moved to Kyiv, but there he was known only as a botanist. The analysis of the old inventory books of the NMNH collections and the history of movements of zoologists-collectors shows that the studied specimen, together with hundreds of others, was part of the working collection of O. Mygulin and was transported by him from Kharkiv to Kyiv when he began to work in “Zagotkhutro” in Zavorychy and as a doctoral student at the Zoological Museum of VUAN. Later, this specimen, like hundreds of others, was transferred to the osteological collection of the Department of Palaeozoology of ZooBIN (which was reorganized into the Institute of Zoology in 1939), and finally ended up in the Department of Palaeontology of the NMNH. During 90 years of forced "migration", the specimen changed at least four locations of storage and at least six nominal institutions (two in Kharkiv and four in Kyiv).