On the 70th anniversary of the Great Victory: "The City of Winners" exhibition in Moscow

Timed to the 70th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War "The City of Winners" exhibition has opened on May 9, 2015, at the Museum of Moscow; it is dedicated to memories of war rather than war itself. The main exhibition’s heroes are the letters of the relatives, the witnesses’ diaries, photographs and newsreels, official documents, posters, and even school textbooks.

The exhibition begins with a conversation about what kind of memory about war and with what means were created in the postwar decades. Visitors are met with the photos of modern parades and parades of the Soviet years, the movies, the monuments and posters. This is a story about the war, which is spoken on a special language that several times has been changed over these 70 years.

From the post-war period the visitor enters the city of the war years: stuffed with “hedgehogs” and sandbags streets and squares, owned by the ones, who went to the front, apartments, the desks, behind which Moscow inhabitants wrote theirs notes and read the letters from the front. Foremost artifacts in this part of the exhibition are the documents, certificates, submitted by certain people whose lives changed forever on June 22, 1941. The last section of the exhibition is focused on the last days of pre-war world in the capital.

"The City of Winners" presents about two hundred records, each reviling an individual fate.

Many of these documents - personal letters, diaries, official documents - were kept in the families for years and donated to the museum by Moscow residents, including the pieces from the previous, dedicated to war exhibitions. A special space is reserved at the exhibition for belongings and stories that people may want to share with the museum, continuing the tradition of the handing memory of the war from generation to generation.