“The Murmansk bolsheviks were placed in quotation marks”: the memoir work of the fighters for Soviet power and Soviet historiography

For the first time in Russian historiography, the article examines the problem of the relationship between Soviet historiography and the memoir work of the “fighters for Soviet power” in the Murmansk Region. Soviet historians traditionally associated the beginning of foreign intervention in Soviet Russia with this region. The article concludes that the memoir work turned out to be strongly tied to the experience of official historiography. Memoirs written with the participation of the Murmansk Regional Commission on the History of the October Revolution and the Party of the Bolsheviks (Istpart) in the 1920s - 1930s, were designed to reinforce the official historical concept and in fact were its elementary reproduction. Based on the study of transcripts of oral interviews of participants in the revolutionary events, it appears that the effectiveness of the work of the Istpart commission depended on the arbitrariness of the latter and was facilitated by the passive attitude of informants to memoir practices. The situation had changed by the 1960s. With the publication of the memoirs of V. L. Brzezinski and T. D. Averchenko, it became possible to talk about other memoir works: these authors did not accept the provisions of the official historical concept and its main thesis - about the seizure by the counterrevolution of all democratic organizations in Murmansk in 1917. The awakening of the memory of the participants in the events was caused by the loss of their trust in the work of historians, which testified to the crisis that befell the official historiography. On Soviet soil a new form of historiography was emerging, in which the functions of the historian and the eyewitness of events merged. At the same time, the publication of new memoirs in the USSR was difficult. The publication was achieved only by a famous writer V. K. Ketlinskaya, who disguised her book as a literary work and got a broad discussion of the issues raised in it. An important role in the process of changing the status of memoirs was played by the position of the staff of the Murmansk party and state archives, who showed an unbiased attitude to documents and provided researchers with access to the manuscripts of memoirs.