To survive, to preserve, to restore: about the connection between the 80th anniversary of the Great Victory and the 160th anniversary of the Novgorod Museum-Reserve

In honor of Victory Day and on the eve of the anniversary of the Novgorod Museum-Reserve, a unique exhibition, "The Memory of Grief is Harsh, the Memory of Glory is Alive," opened in the Kremlin's Government Offices building. More than 300 authentic relics presented there are witnesses to the tragic events on the Volkhov and Northwestern Fronts, those terrible days when the enemy wiped the spiritual center of Russia off the face of the earth. This is evidenced by the footage of the war chronicle, which captured the figures of the "Millennium of Russia" monument scattered in the snow...

During the occupation of 1941-1944, the Novgorod Museum lost more than 30,000 cultural heritage monuments; the war caused seemingly irreparable damage to the ancient Russian city and national culture. The exhibits of the exhibition dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the Great Victory tell about the people's feat, courage and heroism of the front-line soldiers, the fortitude of the Russian people and the belief that everything will be reborn, and Novgorod will ultimately be saved. As will its pearl - the museum.

The history of the Novgorod Museum-Reserve goes back 160 years, and today it is one of the leading and most visited federal museums. Starting with a small collection of antiquities, it has turned into a large-scale scientific and cultural center preserving the world-significant heritage of Veliky Novgorod. It unites dozens of architectural monuments, implements various exhibition and research projects, and its collections number about a million storage units.

If you haven't visited museum objects for a long time, it would be a good idea to do so on the eve of the anniversary. And get acquainted with the mentioned exhibition for the 80th anniversary of the Victory to better understand the past. You can also join the participants of the "Night of Museums", which traditionally (and symbolically) takes place on the eve of the museum's birthday. This is one of the most popular formats of the institution's work. "Night"-2025 will take place on May 17 and, judging by the program, promises to be extremely exciting. Other events are also being prepared that educate us and expand our horizons.

You can learn a lot of interesting things if you look into the community of the museum-reserve on the social network VKontakte. Under the rubric "160 stories for the 160th anniversary of the museum" a series of virtual journeys to the most unusual and atmospheric corners of the museum space of the Novgorod land has been launched. Stories about people, discoveries, destinies and memory are also being prepared.

On the same resource, during the days of the victorious May, two amazing media projects debuted. "Museum Regiment" - mini-stories with photographs about the employees who, at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, saved museum valuables, took out what they could, buried them, and in the post-war years collected and restored them. This regiment was very small - a few employees from the director to the quartermaster, but there were people fanatically devoted to their work, who did not notice that they were doing something heroic.

We are used to learning about the past from museum workers. But in addition to the history of Novgorod and the history of the country, each museum employee has their own story and their own scores to settle with the war. "Memory of the Heart" is the name of another project on the social network, prepared by the team for the 80th anniversary of the Victory and the 160th anniversary of their institution. This is a series of videos with stories about the participants of the Great Patriotic War, relatives and friends of the museum employees.

The General Director of the institution Sergey Bryun was the first to speak in the video "Memory of the Heart" with a story about his grandparents. This baton-roll call of generations was picked up by the Deputy Director Ilya Melnikov, senior research fellows Yulia Komarova, Lyubov Erysheva, Vladimir Varnaev, Elvira Manukyan , Lyudmila Parshina. It will take only a few minutes to get acquainted with the videos. At the same time, each of these heartfelt family stories tells not only about the fates of people of the generation of winners, but also about the fact that thanks to them, unique objects and values ​​are preserved, our national culture is alive and developing, and there are specialists who protect this wealth.

Lyudmila Parshina tells about her parents, participants of the Great Patriotic War, in the mentioned project. Today she is considered the most experienced specialist of the institution, her length of service in the Novgorod Museum is 57 years! Although, as Lyudmila Vladimirovna herself admits in a conversation with our correspondent, she never even thought that her whole life would be devoted to only one thing - the museum.

“ Now you especially understand that a lot was passed on from my parents. They took part in the Great Patriotic War, experienced a lot and at the time they missed a lot. They were strict and demanding, but they tried to introduce my sister and me to culture, we visited different museums and exhibitions together,” shares Lyudmila Vladimirovna. “After school, I wanted to enter the Academy of Arts, but I didn’t pass the competition. I had to work somewhere. My mother insisted that I go to the Novgorod Museum as a simple employee. Now our museum-reserve is so famous and large-scale, but at that time it was different. The main objects of my admiration then were people! I was like a blank sheet compared to them, and they were the smartest, knowing everything, so unattainable and very devoted to their work .”

Today, the same can be said about our interlocutor. Lyudmila Parshina devoted her entire life to the Novgorod Museum-Reserve: she led tours of various museum objects, conducted research, went on expeditions, collecting exhibits of folk art, worked with archaeologists - she was interested in everything. From 1985 to 2011, she headed the Vitoslavlitsy Museum of Wooden Architecture. She says that " even being a narrow specialist, you constantly discover something for yourself, a museum is an environment that constantly requires the use of knowledge, life goes on in the museum process ."

Now she, Lyudmila Vladimirovna Parshina, is considered a walking encyclopedia of the Novgorod Museum, who grew up in the circle of such eminent specialists as Leonid Yegorovich Krasnorechyev, Vladimir Ivanovich Povetkin, Lyudmila Ivanovna Petrova, Valentin Lavrentyevich Yanin and others. But that is another story, which the online newspaper "Novgorod" will tell in the near future.

Svetlana Lebedeva

Photo by Lyudmila Stepiko,

press service of the Novgorod State United Museum-Reserve ,

from the editorial archive and the personal archive of Lyudmila Parshina