The Experience of Commemorating of the Civil War in the Alexander Palace-Museum: On the History of the Exhibition "Defense of Red Petrograd" (1939–1941)

This study examines the history of the monographic exhibition "The Defense of Red Petrograd," which opened at the Alexander Palace-Museum in Pushkin in the summer of 1939 and was lost during the Great Patriotic War, within the context of the development of museums in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Based on a wide range of sources, the author examined individual aspects of the exhibition and reconstructed the content of the main sections of its exposition. Furthermore, the sociocultural preconditions that shaped both the project's inception and some of its formal and substantive features are analyzed, particularly the motivations for commemorating the Battle of Petrograd in 1919 that existed in Soviet society in the late 1930s. The research methodology consisted of the historical-genetic method, the method of source analysis, and the method of reconstruction, applied in the process of studying the existence of the exhibition in the Alexander Palace, as well as the methods of deduction and modeling, used to determine the unrealized potential for the development of the exhibition and its significance in the history of museum affairs in Leningrad. As a result of this research, numerous facts from the history of the "Defense of Red Petrograd" exhibition were introduced into scholarly discourse for the first time. It was established that the exhibition was executed at a high professional level and enjoyed popularity with audiences throughout its existence. At the same time, it was marked by numerous negative aspects of the era that gave rise to it: the neglect of authentic relics of the past in favor of visual propaganda, the cultivation of the personality cult of I. V. Stalin, and so on. According to the assumptions put forward in the final section of the article, the exhibition in the Alexander Palace could have eventually developed into a full-fledged Museum of the Defense of Petrograd, but this opportunity was missed. At the same time, the exhibition in question likely became one of the sources of inspiration for the creators of the exhibition "The Heroic Defense of Leningrad" – the future Museum of the Defense of Leningrad – and thus nevertheless influenced the development of museum affairs in the post-war city on the Neva.