Savitsky Museum: the Louvre of the steppe

The Karakalpak State Museum of Art, universally called the Savitsky Museum after its founder, holds the second-largest collection of Russian avant-garde art in the world after the Russian Museum in St Petersburg — but with far more banned and semi-banned artists.

Igor Savitsky (1915–1984) was a Ukrainian painter who moved to Nukus in the 1950s to work on ethnographic expeditions. Living in a remote autonomous republic 1,600 km from Moscow, he realised he was insulated enough from Soviet cultural authorities to collect art that would have been destroyed elsewhere.

Over 30 years he: - Bought up thousands of paintings from widows of purged artists (often for tiny sums or in exchange for food). - Smuggled works from Moscow and Leningrad in his suitcase. - Convinced the Karakalpak government he was collecting "revolutionary local culture" — a fig-leaf that let officially banned Fauvist and Constructivist work into a state museum.

Highlights of the collection: - Alexander Volkov — bright Cézanne-influenced landscapes of Uzbekistan. - Ural Tansykbayev — Kazakh modernism. - Nadezhda Kashina — dreamy interior scenes. - Alexander Nikolayev (Usto Mumin) — mystical Persian-influenced miniatures.

Plus a serious ethnographic wing with Karakalpak jewellery, yurt furnishings, and archaeological finds from Khorezm.

Nukus is a 15-hour train ride or 2-hour flight from Tashkent. The museum alone justifies the trip.