The “Great Patriotic War” in Army Museums in Kaunas, Moscow and Minsk in the Post-War Period

Museums play a central role in shaping historical knowledge and national identity discourses, reflecting governmental and social narratives while simultaneously informing public historical consciousness. This article examines the museal representation of the Great Patriotic War in three Soviet military museums during the early post-war period: the War Museum in Kaunas, the Central Army Museum in Moscow, and the war museum in Minsk. Drawing on archival documents, exhibition guides, museum publications, and photo documentation, the analysis traces how each institution translated the requirement of a unified Soviet narrative into distinct exhibitionary practices, shaped by differing wartime experiences, national traditions, political frameworks, and varying degrees of curatorial latitude.The comparison is structured around institutional history, architecture and outdoor space, and exhibition concepts and narratives, situating each museum within the broader military and political context of the war in Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus. While Kaunas had to accommodate an already-established national museum to Soviet ideological demands, Moscow’s Central Army Museum aligned closely with dominant Soviet war memory, and the newly founded Minsk museum developed a regional narrative emphasizing the partisan movement and civilian suffering. Despite the eventual standardization of Soviet museum policy after 1956, the article demonstrates that in the immediate post-war decade, considerable regional and national variation persisted.It is argued that these early, differentiated appropriations of the war experience left a lasting imprint on the cultures of remembrance in Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus. In Kaunas, this manifested after 1990 in a reorientation toward anti-Soviet national memory, in Minsk, in a continued emphasis on partisan resistance and civilian suffering. In Moscow, by contrast, the Great Patriotic War remains embedded within the Soviet historical narrative as part of a continuous revolutionary history since 1917, yet increasingly recast in exclusively Russian, rather than Soviet, terms. By tracing these long-term continuities, the article contributes to understanding how contemporary politicizations of the Great Patriotic War, including its instrumentalization in the war against Ukraine, are rooted in patterns established in the museum landscape of the early post-war Soviet Union.