Press releases

7 Oct 2019

Great Patriotic War Museum in Minsk to open new exhibition in October

Belarusian State Museum of the Great Patriotic War

MINSK, 7 October (BelTA) - The exhibition titled as Rewinding Time will open at the Belarusian State Museum of the Great Patriotic War on 22 October, the museum's director Vladimir Voropayev told BelTA.

The exhibition project is dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the museum. “The exhibition will feature more than 500 items that have been donated to the museum over the past five years. Visitors will see combat awards, personal belongings, documents of war veterans, weapons, photos of military photojournalists Aleksandr Ditlov and Evgeny Podshivalov, drawings and sketches of Belarusian and Russian artists Sergei Katkov, Dmitry Krasilnikov, Boris Arakcheyev, Georgy Poplavsky, Semyon Abramov and Piotr Sharipo,” Vladimir Voropayev said.

The museum will also showcase the gifts it received from government delegations of Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Egypt, China, and Myanmar. “All museum items will be displayed for the first time. I can assure you that we have not done anything like this before," the director said.

Vladimir Voropayev stressed that the opening date of the exhibition project is not accidental. It was on 22 October 1944 that the museum began its activities in the liberated territory of Belarus. At the same time, it started chronicling the war during the fierce battles on the front, in 1942.

“A special commission was set up to collect wartime documents and materials. It was during the first six months of its work that it collected unique materials which were then went on display as part of the exhibition ‘Belarus lives, Belarus is fighting, Belarus was and will be the Soviet.’ It opened in early November of 1942 in the building of the State Historical Museum in Red Square in Moscow. There were only 313 exhibits. Those were documents, photographs, personal belongings, and even works of art,” Vladimir Voropayev recalled.

The exhibition worked in Moscow until August 1944 and was then transported to Minsk. It laid the foundation of the museum's first exhibition on the liberated Belarusian land. In 1944, the BSSR leadership decided to allocate the House of Trade Unions, one of the few buildings that survived in the center of Minsk, to the museum.

In January 1966, the museum moved to a new building in Leninsky Prospekt. The museum celebrated another milestone on 2 July 2014 in the run-up to the 70th anniversary of the country’s liberation from the Nazi invaders. The new headquarters of the museum in Pobediteley Prospekt welcomed presidents of Belarus and Russia Aleksandr Lukashenko and Vladimir Putin among its first visitors.