Timed to the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution exhibition in the Presidential Library

The exposition covers all the significant, as well as the little-known, events that happened in Petrograd in the period from January 1917 to the 7th of January 1918 - the day of acceleration of the Constituent Assembly.

Some official documents will be presented within the framework of the exhibition: investigative cases, protocols, decrees, appeals and petitions, etc. Official and business documents give us bold facts, giving chances for their interpretation. Moreover, the document itself can become a statement of a real fact only after certain circumstances have elapsed. For example, the famous appeal “To the Citizens of Russia!” that announced a deposition of the Provisional Government, was published at 10 am on October 25. In fact, it was, rather, a kind of “declaration of intent” on the part of the Bolsheviks, but in no means a fait accompli - the Provisional Government was at this moment in the Winter Palace, organizing its defense and expecting the arrival of loyal troops from the front. At the same time, the exhibition will present a report from Petrograd dated October 29 stating that A. F. Kerensky with the troops is already in Petrograd, the Red Army soldiers ground arms, the cruiser Aurora left for Kronstadt, and Lenin and Zinoviev ran away. And if the Kerensky-Krasnov offensive had been crowned with success, this document would now be regarded as historically reliable, while the appeal would be a propaganda fake.

There will be a lot of modern photographs at the exhibition, depicting the places where the revolutionary events of 1917 unfolded. Despite the fact that over the past hundred years many of the streets and squares changed their names, some of the buildings were destroyed and new ones appeared instead - the very space of the city where these events occurred remained. These pictures allow to see historical places in their connection with the present, but also to notice a certain transformation of the attitude towards them, imprinted in memorial signs of various kinds – in memorial plaques or the monuments.

Included in the exposition memories and diaries of participants and contemporaries of the events of 1917 give a viewer a chance to find out the subjective and often opposite assessments of the events taking place in the city and in the country, due to different political views of the authors, different degrees of their awareness, and often opportunistic considerations at the time of creation of the memoirs, a lot of which were written years after the revolution.

The Presidential Library in the year of the 100th anniversary of the 1917 revolution in Russia also presents a large-scale collection on the year 1917. It includes electronic copies of archive files, rare books, research papers, letters, photographs, film documents, diaries and many other valuable sources.

The exhibition features the pieces of the Presidential Library, the archive of the Office of the Federal Security Service in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast, the Leningrad Oblast State Archive in Vyborg, the Scientific Library named after M. Gorky of St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg State Theater Library, Interregional Centralized Library System named after M. Y. Lermontov in St. Petersburg, the Fundamental Library named after Empress Maria Feodorovna, the Russian State Pedagogical University named after A. I. Herzen, the Museum of City Electric Transport of “Gorelectrotrans” St. Petersburg State Unitary Enterprise, the Historical and Cultural Museum Complex in Razliv, the Children's Museum of the Postcard, the St. Petersburg Branch of the “National Film Fund of the Russian Federation” State-financed Federal Institution of Culture.

The exhibition will last until May 12, 2017. Please register over the phone (812) 334-25-14 or email us at excursion@prlib.ru to visit the exposition.