On May 24-26, 2022, in St. Petersburg will be held the international scientific conference “Hero Cities: front and rear in the largest battles of the Great Patriotic War”.
The conference was organized by St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the State Memorial Museum of the Defense and Siege of Leningrad, and the European University in St. Petersburg.
More than 50 researchers from Russia, as well as countries of near and far abroad will take part in the conference. Within the framework of the plenary session, the main attention will be paid to the cities officially awarded the title of “Hero City”. Sectional reports are devoted to the functioning of the authorities, industry and the problems of the military everyday life of the cities that contributed to the common Victory in the war. Within the framework of the conference, it is also planned to discuss the problems of memory of the Great Patriotic War and new methods in studying the history of this period. Conference program (in Russian).

On the eve of the Victory Day, the issue of searching and identifying pages of personal history that complement the macrohistory of the Fatherland is especially relevant for educating the younger generation of interest and respect for historical memory. Within the framework of the agreement between St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the gymnasiums of the Petrogradsky district under the program “The Faculty of Social Sciences” on May 5, 2022, Doctor of History. Yu.Z. Kantor gave a lecture “When does history come to life? How archival funds are replenished”.

Yu.Z.Kantor shared her experience in studying plots related to the fate of cultural values ​​and their keepers during the Great Patriotic War. Thus, in the course of one of these projects, letters from Hermitage employees who were evacuated to Sverdlovsk, where the exhibits were sent, were found in personal collections. These ego-documents, which made it possible to reconstruct the details of everyday life and the work of Leningrad art critics and their colleagues in the Urals, were preserved by Sverdlovsk TV director Zoryana Rymarenko, who in the post-war period created films about the Hermitage: a kind of “memory broadcast”. And the letters from the children of the Hermitage workers, who were evacuated in a boarding school in the Molotov Region (Permsky Kray), identified by the author of the lecture, made it possible not only to learn the everyday details of their stay, but also to find out ways to preserve cultural memory. After all, these testimonies were collected by a caring person – a school teacher Tamara Mikheeva, who thus passed on historical memory to students of post-war generations. Today, these invaluable testimonies of the intertwining of people’s destinies, museum-evacuation everyday life and history are kept in the Scientific Archive of Manuscripts and Documentary Fund of the State Hermitage.

At the lecture, which aroused the genuine interest of the audience, as evidenced by the large number of questions to the author, Yu.Z. Kantor paid special attention to how one should learn to extract information from the most seemingly insignificant strokes, how journalism helps to collect information about destinies people involved in a particular historical plot, to identify and attribute the personal documents of eyewitnesses, and how, sometimes in an incredible way, a connection is found between the events of personal and global history.

On April 21 at St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of History Vadim Ibragimovich Musaev presented his new monograph “Different Christian communities in the North-West of Russia in the 1900s – 1930s”, in which all the history of main non-Orthodox confessional communities of St. Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad and in general in the North-West on the basis of materials from previously unpublished documentary sources was studied. The meeting was held as part of the program “Discussions in the Likhachev House” , which offers a scientific or non-fiction discussion of research and topics that have not lost their urgency.

The issue of the meeting attracted the attention of journalists, the museum community and the Christian denominations of St. Petersburg – representatives of the Lutheran communities (Finnish, Estonian, Latvian), St. Petersburg Orthodox Theological Academy, the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg and the Museum of the History of Religion took part in the discussion. Questions were asked regarding examples of positive interaction between the Orthodox Church and non-Orthodox traditional communities, as well as the relationship of free Protestant communities with traditional Christian denominations of the North-West, about the fate in the post-revolutionary years of the fostered inhabitants of numerous charitable institutions established by all Christian denominations of St. Petersburg, as well as a number of other questions.

At the meeting of the Second Likhachev Readings on April 14, 2022, a ceremony was held to donate the memorial items of Nikolai Petrovich Likhachev and his entourage to St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences for the organization of a memorial room in his memory. The virtual exhibition presents photographs of these gifts.

The academician’s granddaughter Natalya Alekseevna Kondratova handed over her grandfather’s personal belongings: nacre cufflinks, a pocket watch, as well as personal belongings of N.P. Likhachev’s wife Natalya Gennadievna: a letter seal, an elegant travel box made of walnut root with inlay. A separate complex consists of items from the Likhachev family service: a dish, a plate, a silverware.

Two family photo albums are of particular value. They incorporate photographs taken by the contact method in 1914-1915, which depict events related to the First World War, as well as Russian estate views.

N.P. Likhachev’s relative Vasily Nikolaevich Nenarokov handed over a photograph of Natalya Gennadievna Likhacheva with her son Alexei in her arms, which was originally located in the house at Petrozavodskaya 7 and now, thus, has returned home after a century.

The granddaughter of a friend, colleague and relative of the academician of the famous Kazan historian S.I. Porfiriev, Irina Vasyanovna Porfiryeva, presented a selection of reprints of her grandfather’s articles. Their topics are close to the scientific interests of N.P. Likhachev. This is the second gift of I.V. Porfiryeva. At the First Likhachev Readings, she handed over three letters from the scientist S.I. Porfiriev.

An unusual and valuable ceramic ushebti figurine handed over by N.A.Kondratova is an imitation of an ancient Egyptian fine sculpture. Undoubtedly, we have before us evidence of the collecting activity of N.P. Likhachev. These and other gifts are presented at the online exhibition.

The round table “To the 80th anniversary of the mass executions of civilians in the Novgorod region” organized by St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Novgorod State United Museum-Reserve under the auspices of the Branch of the Russian Historical Society in Veliky Novgorod was held on April 26, 2022 in Novgorod Museum-Reserve. It was dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Nazi genocide in the North-West of the RSFSR during the Great Patriotic War and was held as part of the No Statute of Limitation project.

Reports were made by researchers from St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, revealing various aspects of the history of those tragic events and the memorialization of historical memory. On the eve of the Victory Day on May 9, in their speeches, the participants emphasized the need to preserve historical memory, further study the unknown pages of the Great Patriotic War and popularize knowledge about it to future generations.