Museum and war

Dear friends!

There are different memories of war.

Overwhelming shared war memory manifests itself with great battles and unthinkable losses, capturing impenetrable strongholds and destroyed cities, parades, and salutes. A private, family war memory is shown with a soldier’s triangle letter worn down on folders, a photograph of a great-grandfather, who was a member of guards unit, military orders in a tin box…

How do we keep memories of war for posterity?

The role of museums in this sense is difficult to overestimate.

From the first days of the war, the employees of the Museum of the Revolution collected materials that would become the basis of the Museum’s unique collection of documents and artifacts of the Great Patriotic War. And today we have taken over our predecessors, working with family archives, recording personal memoirs of war veterans and children of war.

The catalogue that you are holding in your hand contains priceless relics, artifacts of the war, stored in the Museum of Contemporary History of Russia. They are priceless because it is impossible to evaluate the deed of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers during the Great Patriotic War.

The more remote the events of the past from us, the more closely we look into the faces of those who saved the country and the world from fascism, the more important for us the evidence of their heroic deeds and suffering.

This is our memory and our pride we are obliged to leave to our descendants.

The memory of the Great Patriotic War remains vivid!

Immortal Regiment and Russia’s Search Movement, new films, and books, museum expositions, and exhibitions prove this, but the main thing is a personal need to know the heroic history of our homeland.

Respectfully yours,

Irina Velikanova

Director-General, the State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia