Shaping the Memory of the Siege of Leningrad: Institute for the History of CPSU in 1942-1944

The thesis examines the Leningrad Institute of History of the Party in 1941-1944. At that time, a Commission on the History of the Defense of Leningrad in the Great Patriotic War was formed in the Institute. During the Commission's work, the Institute's academic staff collected a vast corpus of documents, including interviews, as well as diaries of the citizens of the besieged Leningrad. The thesis explores how during the War, Leningrad party historians created the archive of the blockade of Leningrad. In this text, the concept of the “archive” is used in the Foucauldian sense and implies that certain values and regimes of truth were implemented in the process of creating the archive. The paper addresses the issue of the temporality of the archive as well. The primary source for the thesis was the documentation of the Institute, produced in the process of collecting the archive. Among them are reports, plans, and protocols, correspondence, memos, and instructions. A part of the thesis is devoted to the study of the collected interviews - not only their transcripts but also questionnaires are studied. The author of the thesis demonstrates that the structures of narratives of the memory of the blockade were formed before it had begun, for the practices of archiving and historiography used by the Institute's staff to describe the blockade of Leningrad were formed by the avant-garde historiography of the 1920s-1930s. The thesis reconstructs the work of the commission, demonstrates its complex structure and hierarchy that had a significant impact on the content of the archive. The thesis examines the temporal regimes of an archive. It is demonstrated that the Institute's staff addressed present as history; at the same time, the institutional time had a significant impact on the archive. The author examines the narratives contained in the questionnaires and concludes that the Institute’s search for narrative coherence has not been successful. It happened not only because some of the questionnaires undermined the formed narrative, but also because the were not read by the respondents in “the right way.” Although an archive remained unclaimed throughout the Soviet period, the work of the Commission, affected the memory of the Siege of Leningrad significantly. It became a kind of laboratory, which created narratives about the blockade of Leningrad and tested various versions of its use. The memory narratives, shaped in the 1940s, were actively reproduced since the 1950s and still live nowadays.