Private Grief, Public Mourning

Soviet Art House ◽

10.1093/oso/9780197548363.003.0015 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 350-366

Author(s):

Catriona Kelly

Keyword(s):

Elderly Women ◽

Newspaper Article ◽

War Memory ◽

Great Patriotic War

Sergei Mikaelyan’s Widows (1976) is a highly unusual war movie because of its focus on civilians and on “postmemory,” the retrospective experience of the aftermath of conflict. Two elderly women campaign against the removal of the remains of two soldiers whom they found in a nearby field during the Great Patriotic War, and the publicity then inspires many people bereaved during the conflict to claim the remains as “theirs.” The chapter traces the origins of the story in a 1970 newspaper article and its slow transition to the big screen, not helped by assessors in the studio and at Goskino who found the material “tasteless.” As the analysis shows, the film raised uncomfortable questions about the significance of war memory in a new and changed society; Widows was to remain an admired movie that never quite made it into the canon.

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THE ISSUE OF PRIVATE COLLECTIONS OF THE DOCUMENTS ON THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR 1941–1945. THE ARCHIVE OF I. S. STRELBITSKY

History and Archives ◽

10.28995/2658-6541-2021-4-134-140 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 134-140

Author(s):

Sergey V. Chirkov

Keyword(s):

Assistant Professor ◽

Moscow Region ◽

Scientific Article ◽

Scientific Conference ◽

Historical Sources ◽

Central State ◽

War Memory ◽

Great Patriotic War ◽

State Archives ◽

Private Collections

The author of this article, historian-archivist, archival scientist and archaeographer Sergey Vasilievich Chirkov (1947–2020) passed away shortly before the scientific conference “Archives and War; Memory of the Past, and Historical and Documentary Heritage”. It was organized by the Department of History and Organization of Archives Administration of the Russian State University for the Humanities where he worked as an assistant professor for many years. Sergey Vasilievich was planning to participate in the conference with his report about the Great Patriotic War materials based on the private collections and funds of the Central State Archives of the Moscow region (CSAMR). Elena Alekseevna Chirkova, his widow, reworked his paper into a scientific article, which is presented in this journal. The article is devoted to the analysis of the documents from the personal fund of Lieutenant-General of Artillery Ivan Semenovich Strelbitsky. The fund contains unique historical sources which were presented to the Central State Archives of the Moscow region by M.M. Strelbitskaya, the widow of the General. The unique resources incorporate biographical materials, award documents for orders and certificates for medals received during the war, memoires, epistolary heritage. There is also a great number of photographs in the fund: mainly group photographs of soldiers and commanders of the units and subunits that General Strelbitsky served with.

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Memory Makers of the Great Patriotic War

Journal of Educational Media Memory and Society ◽

10.3167/jemms.2021.130102 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (1) ◽

pp. 13-32

Author(s):

Anne E. Hasselmann

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

Armed Forces ◽

War Memory ◽

War Narrative ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Great Patriotic War ◽

Red Army ◽

History Of ◽

The Impact ◽

War Commemoration

In the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Soviet museum curators began to establish a museal depiction of the war. This article analyzes these early beginnings of Soviet war commemoration and the curtailing of its surprising heterogeneity in late Stalinism. Historical research has largely ignored the impact of Soviet museum workers (muzeishchiki) on the evolution of Russian war memory. Archival material from the Red Army Museum, now renamed the Central Museum of the Armed Forces, in Moscow and the Belarus Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War in Minsk documents the unfolding of locally specific war exhibitions which stand in stark contrast to the later homogenized official Soviet war narrative. Yet war memory was not created unilaterally by the curators. Visitors also participated in its making, as the museum guestbooks demonstrate. As “sites of commemoration and learning,” early Soviet war exhibitions reveal the agency of the muzeishchiki and the involvement of the visitors in the “small events” of memory creation.

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The Problem of Memory Preservation and Identity Formation (on the Example of the Great Patriotic War Memory)

Izvestiya of Altai State University ◽

10.14258/izvasu(2021)6-06 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 46-50

Author(s):

S.N. Pogodin ◽

Z.Z. Bakhturidze

Keyword(s):

Identity Formation ◽

Destructive Effect ◽

Civic Consciousness ◽

War Memory ◽

Soviet People ◽

The Past ◽

National Memory ◽

Great Patriotic War ◽

Educational Task ◽

The Individual

Significant events of the past have always been the most important aspects in the structuring of national memory. Obviously, they also become key elements in the formation of identity. Therefore, the use of various falsifications, distortions of history, and manipulations in this area seems to be quite logical in the framework of the ongoing information war. The devaluation and depersonalization of the Great Patriotic War memory, of the irreplaceable losses and sacrifices of the Soviet people, of exploits in the name of the Motherland and in the name of victory over fascism have crushing power, destroy the integration potential of the Soviet past, have a destructive effect on the formation of an identity that should be associated with the correct interpretation of the heroic role of the Soviet people. Pride in the past of one's country contributes to the formation of civic consciousness and a positive awareness of one's belonging. The roots of this perception are in the stories of eyewitnesses of those events, which are becoming less and less every year, in the process of socialization, in school history textbooks. In conditions of freedom of choice, with an ever-increasing virtual component of life, in which there are opportunities for the individual to immerse themselves in the format of a completely different socio-cultural space, with a different system of values and meanings, the global elite imposes new standards and determines the field of choice for modern youth. At the same time, our educational task is the preservation and reproduction of memory for future generations.

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