Stalingrad - our proud glory

The Presidential Library is integrating the resources to study the Battle of Stalingrad, which mostly determined the course of the Great Patriotic War. January 31, 2013 scientists, veterans, representatives of government agencies and public from Volgograd and St. Petersburg discussed the prospects of further scientific search work in this area via videoconferencing.

Dialogue was held between experts who gathered in a multimedia complex of the Presidential Library and in the Volgograd Regional Universal Library, where opened a regional center of access to the resources of the first national e-library in the country. Thanks to it, collections of documents and materials related to the Great Patriotic War are broadly available in the region.

Sergey Makeev, Deputy Director General of the Presidential Library for corporate development, outlined: "As an organization of a new type that creates not only electronic collections, but also the environment for cultural communication, we were happy to respond to the proposal of our colleagues to take part in a conference on such an important topic and present our own electronic resources"

The resources of the Presidential Library, also through interaction with the Volgograd region, provide access to unique documentary evidence of those years. Digital copies of rare and little-known books show that Stalingrad was not broken, neither by the Nazi military machine, nor by the Nazi ideology. In 1944, the regional publishing of Stalingrad issued a collection of poems. It included the works of war correspondents, soldiers of the Red Army, written on the front line, in between the battles. One of the capital works of the book was a poem by a Leningrad poet Alexander Prokofiev, who was born in the village of Kobona on Lake Ladoga, where people were evacuated from the besieged city on the Neva via the road of life. Common features of two strongholds - Leningrad and Stalingrad - are embodied in these lines: "Stalingrad - our proud glory / / Our battle friend and brother / / Our native outposts swore / / to resemble you, Stalingrad".

A great amount of research works, including the ways of economical management, is represented by electronic copy of the “Stalingrad Pravda” of 1943 held by the Presidential Library. It describes a rapid restoration of the city destroyed by war. There are announcements about the beginning of classes at the Pedagogical Institute. It welcomes those who stopped their studies and new students. September 3, according to one of the issues, “The regional drama theater n. a. M. Gorky presents a performance based on K. Simonov’s “Russian people.”

The Head of the Central Naval Archives, Vladimir Pavlovsky, who attended the conference noted the significance of the availability of the documents.

“200 days and nights lasted this unseen opposition on the Volga – during the entire period land armies were supported by sailors of the Volga war flotilla both in battles and by providing the front line oil products, supply of provisions and arms through the river. Practically all archival sources of the Navy have been declassified and are available to Russian citizens upon request; we are anticipating a new round of interest for the national history on the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad.”

Within the videoconference there was held a presentation of the electronic collection “Great Battles of the Epoch: Battle of Stalingrad” build up by the specialists of the M. Gorky Regional Universal Library of Volgograd and delivered to the electronic repository of the Presidential Library. In includes the documents from the collections of the rare and valuable editions department “Books issued during the Great Patriotic War”, as well as photographs and materials of the “Manuscripts of the victory.”