The role of museum representations of the Great Patriotic War in forming the identity of Soviet citizens

The article deals with the problem of the formation of the identity of Soviet citizens on the basis of the museum representations of the events of the Great Patriotic War in the first post-war expositions of the State Museum of the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic. The sources for the study were the documents of the museum that accompanied the process of creating expositions, the texts of excursions, guidebooks and guest reviews books. Museum expositions in 1948 and 1952 were created within the framework of the historiographical model that had developed in the first post-war years. This model largely determined the vector of historical representations of the war until the 1990s. The article shows which museum tools and exhibits were used to implement the historiographical model of the representation of the war, which factors influenced the formation of expositions, and to what extent the main ideas embedded in them were assimilated by museum visitors. The author concludes that the main means of the museum’s political and educational work, which at the same time were forming its identity, were permanent historical exhibitions that presented a coherent story about the past, a kind of historical narrative. The narrative analysis of the museum expositions allowed the author to reveal how the events of the Great Patriotic War became one of the foundations of the Soviet citizens’ identity. The identity-formation potential of the sections of permanent exhibitions dedicated to the history of the Great Patriotic War was used by the museum workers for patriotic education.