From the Civil War to a War of Liberation: The Formation of Soviet Memory of the Intervention in the Russian North (1918-1920)

The article examines the evolution of the memory of the Civil War and the Entente intervention in the Russian North after 1920. Using the example of the history of monuments and museums in Arkhangelsk, Murmansk, Yokanga (ЗАТО Ostrovnaya) and Mudyug Island, it is shown how the Soviet view of these events was built in these places. The Civil War in the North of 1918-1920 in Soviet memory became rather a war of liberation, where the main enemy was not the government of the Northern Region headed by E.K. Miller, but the Entente interventionists who fought on the side of the Whites. Moreover, although the interventionists did not play a key role at the front, and their evacuation from the North was completed in the autumn of 1919; local monuments in the North were dedicated specifically to the victims of the intervention. Therefore, the main place of memory was Mudyug Island in the White Sea, where a concentration camp was located in 1918-1919, and then the British and the French created a prison for convicts and exiles, where a museum was opened in the 1930s, to which residents of the Soviet North were taken. With a break due to the Second World War, the memorialization process continued until the collapse of the USSR, when most commemorative events and projects were discontinued, and many memorial facilities were abandoned. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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