Belarusian museums during Great Patriotic war

Abstract

The history of Soviet Byelorussian museums during the Great Patriotic War is a little-studied page of the history of the national museum sphere and culture in general. The author is consistently examining the evacuation of museum collections from the eastern part of the republic, the Nazi robbery of the remaining collections of Belarusian museums in the occupied territory, attempts to save them by representatives of the Belarusian intelligentsia, as well as the return of the evacuated and plundered from the East and the West. Particular attention is paid to the difficulties of the collections evacuation from the Vitebsk and Gomel regional museums to the territory of the Russian Soviet Socialist Federation, as well as the courage shown by museum workers during the transportation of valuable items. The robbery of museum collections carried out on the territory of the occupied Soviet Belarus by representatives of the Ministry of the Occupied Eastern Territories under the leadership of A. Rosenberg was complemented by the policy of flirting with the national intelligentsia conducted by the head of the General Commissariat of Belarus, Gauleiter W. Kube. The result of this policy was the opening of several museums and exhibitions in Minsk and on the periphery. A separate dramatic page in the history of the museum of Soviet Belarus is the export in 1944 of the collection of the Belarusian State Museum to Germany, its discovery there by American troops and the subsequent transfer and return to the territory of the USSR by the Soviet military administration in Germany. The fate of the Belarusian Museum in Vilna created by the famous Belarusian national figure I. Lutskevich in 1912 was dramatic as well. In 1945 his collections were divided between a number of Belarusian and Lithuanian museum, archival and library institutions. The Belarusian Republican Commission for Assisting the Work of the Extraordinary State Commission dealt with the determination of the damage caused to the Belarusian museums during the hostilities and the German occupation. The article is based on the materials of the National Archives of the Republic of Belarus, periodicals of the war years, as well as published memoirs and interviews with participants in the events described.

Keywords:

museums of Soviet Belarus, Great Patriotic War, museum collections, evacuation, cultural property plunder, cultural heritage repatriation, war losses