戦後スターリン期における独ソ戦の記憶 ── レニングラード防衛博物館に着目して──
Preserving War Memory in the Late Stalinist Period: The Case of the Museum of the Defense of Leningrad

Summary/Abstract: In 1944, the exhibition “Heroic Defense of Leningrad” opened in Leningrad, displaying the tremendous damage inflicted upon the city during the German army’s siege. The exhibition turned into the Museum of the Defense of Leningrad on 27 January 1946, the second anniversary of the end of the siege. Yet Moscow’s oppression of the Leningrad party leadership reached the museum, which was forced to close its exhibition in 1949 and completely dissolve in 1953. This article examines how the museum workers reacted to this pressure of Moscow’s against Leningrad’s own commemoration of World War II. Previous studies have also addressed tensions between the local dimension of memory-making concerning the siege and the central party’s intervention. While they tend to assume the central party’s substantial impact on the local situation, people in Leningrad did not simply accept instructions from above: coping with criticism from the state, they managed to expand the scope of local commemoration. Meanwhile, studies of war museums in general have focused on museum operators, such as the state and local authorities, in illustrating how the museum staff organized exhibition projects. We know how the war museum workers, for example in Moscow and Minsk, developed new aspects of commemoration keeping close contact with the local people. Using this museological approach, I reveal specific features of war commemoration in Leningrad in the late 1940s and 1950s, where the state, local authorities, and visitors had divisive, competing, and conflicting understandings of wartime experiences. It was the museum staff who played a significant role in coordinating and integrating these diverse experiences. To capture the whole picture of the museum’s commemorative projects, I focus particularly on its staff’s activities outside the museum, which have not been adequately analyzed in previous studies. Sections 1 and 2 analyze the exhibits and visitors in the Museum of the Defense of Leningrad. On 27 January 1944, Leningrad was completely liberated from the siege. The organizers of the museum, as well as its precedent exhibitions, initially intended to exhibit the situation on the front lines and in the rear of Leningrad during the war. As the museum records show, the vast majority of the visitors were residents of Leningrad, which accounts for the exhibition designed to enlighten them with the most basic information. The museum demonstrating the sufferings and achievements of the Soviet citizens was also an important destination for many groups of workers and young people from Eastern European countries, as well as British and American personnel. Section 3 addresses the impact of the “Leningrad Affair.” In August 1948, when Zhdanov, the leader of Leningrad, died, his rivals, Malenkov and Beria, expanded their power over the party’s Central Committee in Moscow. As the political changes progressed in the summer of 1949, the Museum of the Defense of Leningrad was attacked by two severe criticisms concerning the production and installation of local leaders’ portraits and the display of weapons. These criticisms by the central party clearly revealed the tensions between the state and the locals revolving around the cult of the leader and the military exhibits. In response to political pressure from Moscow, the museum staff and the Leningrad party organization tried to preserve the museum by taking all possible measures in tune with official propaganda. As a result, the exhibition on the siege of Leningrad was drastically diminished, with all exhibition halls dedicated to the central role of Stalin’s leadership in the whole “Great Patriotic War.” Section 4 describes official trip projects undertaken by the researchers and staff of the Museum of the Defense of Leningrad after the closure of its exhibition. In Moscow, they investigated materials concerning the state’s support to Leningrad during the war. It shows that they placed Leningrad in a “modest position” in relation to Moscow, despite its significance as the second-largest city with a unique historical identity. Simultaneously, the museum staff took advantage of Leningrad’s title of “Hero City” to play an active role in organizing some meetings across a variety of regional museums and in collaborating with many museums in other heroic cities. Thus, the official trip was an attempt to integrate the memory of the Leningrad defense into an all-Soviet commemoration. Another destination of the trip was the wartime occupied areas. The museum staff expanded their scope of research to uncover circumstances of several frontline areas that had not been fully investigated due to severe wartime devastation. In Pskov and Ostrov, cities located in Northwestern Russia, museum researchers collected some photographs and documents related to partisans in the occupied territories. These photographs were handed over to the museum staff by the surviving families of the female partisans and the Komsomol members. These trip activities contributed to turning these partisans into heroines. Although political repression forced the museum staff to transfer its repository of materials to other museums and institutions, they managed to keep the collected photographs intact. Ten years later, they could adapt to the official glorification of the partisan movement in the 1960s by discovering and using the collected documents. This article illustrates the important role the staff of the Museum of the Defense of Leningrad played in maintaining the memory of Leningrad and in collecting war memories in neighboring occupied areas. The collection of items leaving individuals’ hands to be housed in the storage of the museum enabled the museum staff to examine the past of the city and other frontline areas and to integrate diverse war experiences and narratives. In so doing, the museum staff could also highlight ambiguity in memories surrounding the title of “hero/heroine,” which is never narrowly confined to bravery.

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