Heroic Heritage and Consolidating Potential of Russian Libraries

The purpose of the article is to reveal the role of libraries in preserving and restoring the book cultural heritage during the Great Patriotic War of 1941—1945 and to actualize this activity in modern conditions in the format of an interview with a well-known scholar-librarian and historian of libraries, Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences A.M. Mazuritsky. The main feature of the preparation for the 80th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, celebrated on May 9, 2025, is the synchronicity of the anniversary with the Special Military Operation (SMO) to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine, which makes it possible to compare the event series of different chronotypes. The interview uses the comparative-historical method, the method of historical reconstruction and analogy. The discourse allows us to identify similarities in the policy of Hitler’s fascism and the ideology of National Socialism in relation to the cultural values and book heritage of the multinational Soviet state, the actions of the Ukrainian Nazism and the Ukrainian armed forces before the beginning of the SMO and during the hostilities in Donbas, including the territories that became part of the Russian Federation as a result of the referendums of 2022, and in the border regions of our country. This approach allowed us to actualize a list of the most active forms of libraries’ activities during the Great Patriotic War in search, preservation, restoration, systematization of looted collections and their restoration, as well as other practices of professional and civic activity, which will help the library community to reveal the potential of libraries in the consolidation of modern Russian society. It is substantiated the necessity to consider this process as a socio-cultural and managerial activity, the main directions of which are revealed in the interview. Some of these activities are currently already being implemented by municipal, regional and federal libraries at the level of the Russian Library Association.