Suvorov’s Alpine Campaign. Dialogues with the Past

The exhibition project “Suvorov’s Alpine Campaign. Dialogues with the Past” is a joint project of the ROSPHOTO Museum and Exhibition Centre, the A. V. Suvorov State Memorial Museum, and St. Petersburg photographer and journalist Olga Rachkovskaya. It presents photographs of places in Switzerland connected with Suvorov. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, 100 years after the Alpine campaign, Vasily Pavlovich Engelhardt (1818–1915) commissioned Swiss photographers to record the places crossed by Suvorov’s army in 1799. Another century later, Olga Rachkovskaya followed the same route and photographed these sites 200 years after the event. Visitors can therefore compare the Swiss locations 100 and 200 years after the campaign. The project marks the 220th anniversary of Suvorov’s Alpine campaign (1799), celebrated in 2019. It was one of the most difficult and heroic campaigns of his military career, and his last. The Alpine campaign remains part of the shared historical heritage and memory of Russia and Switzerland, where Suvorov has been remembered and honoured for more than two centuries.