The Victory Banner, the diary of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the award plaque of pilot Alexei Maresyev, the overcoat of sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, personal belongings of members of the underground anti-fascist organization “Young Guard”, the emblem and the ark with the relics of St. Luke – all these unique exhibits are on display at the grand exhibition in Moscow Manege “Great Victory. Russia is My History”.
The documentary exhibition project “The Great Victory. Russia – my history”, which closes the year commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Great Victory, covers the period from the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Nazi army and its satellites on June 22, 1941 until the signing of the Japanese Act of Surrender on September 2, 1945.
More than 700 artifacts and documents collected from archives and museums in Russia and Belarus, as well as from private collections, are displayed in the public domain. One of the relics of the exhibition is an icon and a reliquary with the relics of St. Luke brought from the Holy Trinity Monastery in Simferopol.
“The exhibition in Manege has been going on for 12 years,” Metropolitan of Simferopol and Crimea Tikhon (Shevkunov) said at the opening via video link. – The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) organizes many different exhibitions, but this one is very special. The Patriarchal Council of the Russian Orthodox Church helped organize the exhibition, but we left the main place to our historians and archivists. They were able to collect a large number of unique artifacts.
Among the scattered artifacts valuable to witness the era is Directive No. 1 of the People's Commissar of Defense of the Soviet Union on bringing troops into combat readiness; Resolution of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on the establishment of the State Defense Committee; handwritten text of the radio speech of the head of the People's Commissar of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov to the Soviet people on June 22, 1941; message of Patriarch Locum Tenens, Metropolitan of Moscow and Kolomna Sergius (Stragorodsky) with the blessing of the defenders of the Fatherland; a sword in a scabbard – a gift from King George VI of Great Britain to the people of Stalingrad in 1943; Joseph Stalin's draft of a personal message to US President Franklin Roosevelt criticizing the Allies' position on opening a second front in Europe; signature of Marshal Georgy Zhukov's speech delivered at the Victory Parade on June 24, 1945; uniform and wartime awards of Soviet Supreme Commander Joseph Stalin; Germany's initial Military Surrender Act of May 8, 1945, and the Japanese Surrender Act, which ended World War II, on September 2, 1945.
Of particular value to the exhibition are “Diary of the Siege” by Olga Berggolts and paintings by artists from besieged Leningrad.
– The Russian Museum, like no other museum in the country, has a global collection of paintings by survivors of the siege. It is known that during the years of blockade, the regional committee did not give permission for artists to work because it was very dangerous. Alla Manilova, general director of the Russian Museum, said that only 1-2 artists were allowed by Smolny to sit on Nevsky. – If you see a lonely figure, it means that the blockade artist is sitting on a potato box and writing about Nevsky in cold and frost up to 35 degrees. And we introduced these paintings at the exhibition.
Visitors can also take a closer look at the personal belongings of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War – the diary of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the award plaque of pilot Alexei Maresyev, the jacket of sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko and the personal belongings of members of the underground anti-fascist organization “Young Guard” in Krasnodon.
The column “Ordinary Nazism” includes documents about the crimes of the Nazi invaders, Ukrainian and Baltic nationalists, about the invaders' monstrous attitude towards prisoners of war and Soviet civilians detained in concentration camps. One of the artifacts – evidence of the crime – was Alexander Pechersky's shirt, given to him by Lyuka, a prisoner of the Sobibor concentration camp, before he escaped. And the culmination of the project was a unique exhibition – the Victory Banner, hung over the defeated Reichstag.
At the end of the exhibition there are sections dedicated to the decisions of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials of the main war criminals of World War II, and objects containing documents related to the Soviet-Japanese war of August-September 1945.
The exhibition runs until December 8. Further information can be found on the project website.
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The organizers of the exhibition are the Patriarchal Cultural Council of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), the Federal Archives, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation, the Government of Moscow, the State Archives of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Museum, the My History Foundation and the historical parks “Russia – My History”.
