Authors

Discussion

In the two decades after the 1917 Revolution came a transformation of the memory landscape in Russia, as Bolshevik leaders exploited the struggle to overthrow the old regime as a key instrument of political legitimacy. However, they did not just design and bestow from above the memory about revolution as some research indicates – it was rooted in culture of of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia. I claim that the revolutionary antimonarchist (‘liberation movement’) movement, as it existed in 1917 and earlier, enshrined their personal and collective memories, formed as early as in 1890s and solidified in 1910-13, in projects of historical-revolutionary museums. Their memory project embraced all anti-autocratic political groups, radical or liberal, with Bolsheviks included on equal terms with the others, thus representing self-perception of the Russian intelligentsia. Immediately after the February overthrow of the monarchy this group founded the first museum of the revolution in Petrograd – the House-Museum for the Memory of Freedom Fighters. In 1919, the State Museum of Revolution was established under auspices of the Petrograd council thus continuing the memory project developed earlier.