The Russians and the Dutch: the history of relations between the Netherlands and Russia, 1600-1917

The exhibition took place in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow consisting of documents and artefacts on the history of relations of the Netherlands and Russia. The exhibition was held in the scope of a program of cultural and academic cooperation between the USSR and the Netherlands between 1987 and 1989. The exhibition consists of documents, cartography, books and artefacts, which represented the relation between the two countries.

This exhibition was an initiative of the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev to promote his new politics‘ Europe - our Common Home’.

Gorbachev invented "Europe - our Common Home" or the "all-European house" in 1985 forty years after the Second World War, launched it in public in Prague in 1987, and published it in his bestseller Perestroika, 1988.
“We assign an overriding significance to the European course of our foreign policy.... We are resolutely against the division of the continent into military blocs facing each other, against the accumulation of military arsenals in Europe, against everything that is the source of the threat of war. In the spirit of the new thinking we introduced the idea of the "all-European house"... which signifies, above all, the acknowledgment of a certain integral whole, although the states in question belong to different social systems and are members of opposing military-political blocs standing against each other. This term includes both current problems and real possibilities for their solution.”
From M. Gorbachev, Perestroika Moscow 1988. p.204.

OBJECTIVES
An exhibition on the relations between the Netherlands and Russia between 1600 and 1917.

RESULTS
Exhibition in the Rijksmuseum and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the publication of the catalogue.