1919–1945 In June 1919, the Bolshevik government nationalised the property of the Khanenko family. In Bohdan and Varvara's house the State Museum of Art opened. The art historian and artist Georgy Lykomsky (1884-1952) became its first curator. He and Varvara Khanenko combined efforts to create the first exhibitions in the newly established museum. Thanks to the support of Ukrainian scholars, elderly Varvara Khanenko obtained the right to reside at the museum. She chaired the Museum Committee until the end of her life. However, in 1924, two years after Varvara's death, the names of the Khanenkos were removed from the museum's title "due to the lack of revolutionary services to the proletarian culture". In the early 1920s, the newly opened museum received artworks from other nationalised collections of aristocrats, such as the Repnins, the Branytskis, the Hudym-Levkovyches, the Sakhnovskis. In 1921, the collection of Asian art was supplemented with a group of Central Asian ceramics of the 9th–12th centuries from Mykhail Stoliarov's collection. In 1925, in accordance with the last will of the Saint Petersburg art collector Vasyl Shchavinskyi, his unique collection of Northern European artworks was transferred to the museum. During the 1920s, the cultural elite of Soviet Ukraine advocated the idea of the single museum depository and redistribution of museum collections based on the thematic principle. Over the course of this programme's implementation in the 1920s and the 1930s, a significant part of the Khanenkos' collection was handed over to other museums in Kyiv. Some of the most valuable works of European and Asian arts were seized from the museum during the Soviet Union's campaign for selling the museum treasures abroad. Among them were a French tapestry featuring the Adoration of the Magi, paintings by European Old Masters, including the diptych "Adam and Eve" (1512) by Lucas Cranach the Elder, a collection of golden items from the Kyivan Rus period, works of Iranian art (the 7th-century silver chalice and the 13th-century aquamanile in the shape of Zebu cow and a predator). Only on one occasion in the early 1930s Ukrainian cultural figures prevented the seizure of a Persian carpet of the 16th or the 17th century. The former museum with its encyclopaedic collection acquired a far narrower specialisation — that in Western and Eastern art. In the second part of the 1930s, the Kyiv Museum Town at the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra transferred several valuable collections of sacred art to