F. A. Ecker – the first director of the Oranienbaum Museum of the Defense of Petrograd

Commemoration of the Battle of Petrograd in 1919 was one of the key areas of Soviet state policy of memory in the second half of the 1930s and early 1940s. A particular manifestation of this was the creation of a thematic museum dedicated to the designated episode of the Russian civil war: the Oranienbaum Museum of the Defense of Petrograd. The first director of this institution was F. A. Ecker, who saw the institute of memory entrusted to him as a center for the study and popularization of the entire military-historic heritage of the northeast of the Leningrad region. This approach met with opposition from a number of representatives of the Leningrad Museum community but received support from the local political leadership. This study analyzes the socio-cultural factors that determined the activities of F. A. Ecker in Oranienbaum and conditioned its results.