THE EPILOGUE
 The work of archive staff

on collecting materials about members of the Resistance movement in the 1960s and 1980s.
 

Generally speaking, this exhibition is the result of a quarter-century of work by two people, former employees of the archive K.A. Polenkov and T.V. Romanova. All we had to do was select and group the documents into chapters.

As mentioned earlier, the idea of collecting materials about members of the Resistance movement in Europe belonged to Kasyan Andreevich Polenkov (1915-2001), who led the archive from 1951 to 1985.

What made him interested in this topic? — With the onset of the “thaw”^[1], at the turn of the 1950s – 1960s, the departure from the Stalinist interpretation of the Great Patriotic War began, according to which former captive citizens were seen as traitors. In 1965, the 20th anniversary of Victory was celebrated with a parade on Red Square, May 9th officially became a public holiday, and widespread honoring of war veterans began (and most of them were by no means old, having not reached their fiftieth birthday). At the same time, the mass publication of memoirs of war participants, primarily military leaders, began. The memoirs of privates, sergeants, and junior officers were published in periodicals, mostly in newspapers. However, the attitude towards those who were in captivity remained somewhat vague, although all of them were checked by the state security agencies after their release and return to their homeland.

Against this background, K.A. Polenkov began searching for those residents of the region who, while in camps in European countries, managed to escape from captivity and fought in local guerrilla detachments. The work was not carried out quickly and was done by correspondence: having found one of the Resistance members from stories, memoirs, and sometimes rumours, K.A. Polenkov persuaded him to write his own memoirs and to name the names of other Soviet people who were in the same unit. For “optimization”, a special questionnaire was developed: date and place of birth; date of conscription into the Red Army; circumstances of captivity; description of the escape, etc. Sometimes the correspondence with the veteran dragged on for several years: one of them was seriously ill, someone refused to write memoirs himself and talked about them on the record.  Almost everyone was persuaded to send military photographs or copies of them, originals or copies of preserved guerrilla documents.

In most cases, the work undertaken by K.A. Polenkov had a practical and joyful outcome. — Thanks to the documents and memoirs he collected, and requests to Soviet authorities, Soviet and foreign archives (at least to socialist countries), draft award lists for Resistance members were provided to military enlistment offices, and veterans were almost always presented with awards. — Sometimes, these were their only military awards! — check Documents 1-7.

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Whereas K.A. Polenkov was a collector of materials hoping to publish a collection of memoirs, Tatyana Vasilyevna Romanova (1932-2018), who worked as a researcher at the archive from 1971 to 1990, was more of a proponent of popularization. — She wrote dozens of articles, published mainly in the regional press, and a book about Resistance heroes. She corresponded with many of them, discussing private issues of their lives, sometimes through contacting the authorities, she helped solve the financial problems of veterans. — check Documents 8-9.

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And today, more than half a century after K.A. Polenkov's noble initiative, we can present to your attention an exhibition based on the materials collected by him.