Together with the decision of the Supreme Court on the liquidation of the International «Memorial»*, the All-Russian competition of historical research works for high school students «A Man in History. Russia — XX century. In total, about 53 thousand teenagers took part in the competition for 22 years of its existence. What's next for the contest and research archive?
Photo: RIA Novosti
Until the wind has changed
The competition was launched in 1999. Its task is to encourage schoolchildren to independently explore the history of the family, their city or village, country — through the fate of an ordinary person. Every year, high school students sent one and a half to two thousand works. In some years, especially those when the next anniversary of the victory in the Great Patriotic War was celebrated, the number of essays increased dramatically: for example, in 2005, 3514 studies entered the competition. But there are more participants: many works are made by teams of authors.
The competition had thematic nominations: “The Price of Victory”, “History of the Family”, “Man and Power”, “Man and Small Motherland”, “Friends and Others”; the work could be presented in different genres: traditional research work, essay, photo contest, video film; in recent years, new forms have begun to appear — for example, a website or a cartoon, a podcast …
From the very beginning, most of the works — almost three quarters — came from small villages, villages, towns. For the 2020 competition, 53 percent of the entries came from there.
Medium and small cities accounted for 20 percent, the rest — large cities.
Least of all entries, 1096, came to the competition last year: both the covid epidemic and the pressure on Memorial* played a role here. As it became known to the organizing committee of the competition, FSB officers came to schools and spoke about the undesirability of interaction with Memorial, not only with teachers, but also with children.
It wasn't always like that. Twice, in 2013 and 2015, the competition received presidential grants. Many regional ministries of education willingly disseminated information about the competition among schools, and teachers took part in it with pleasure. The participants of the competition received certificates, letters of encouragement, the authors of the 100 best works received books as a gift. The winners, authors of 43 best studies, were invited to Moscow.
The best works were published in annual collections, the last — the 24th — was released in November 2021. The topics are very different: some wrote about the collectivization that took place in their native places, others about the fate of the repressed, exiled, prisoners of war, people known in their places. We found diaries, letters, memoirs in the family archives. Children talked about how they celebrated the New Year in the Soviet provinces in the 1940s and 60s, or about the history of a family whose many generations planted apple orchards wherever they lived, or about the history of a floating temple in the Astrakhan province.
The 20th century is also different in these works: scary, bloody, and creative.
Very personal
Often these are very personal stories. The girl writes about her father, who died in Chechnya when she was five years old: she grew up and began to collect information about him bit by bit. Schoolchildren are interviewing parents, grandparents, trying to understand what the Komsomol is. Others talk about their Tatar roots, about the life of their ancestors in a village near Nizhny Novgorod. “There are a lot of works on local history,” says Tatyana Golubeva, an employee of the organizing committee. — There are many works from the Novosibirsk region and the Krasnoyarsk Territory about the exiled Volga Germans. There was the work of a schoolgirl who became interested in where she got such an unusual surname from — and discovered that her great-grandfather was a white Czech. In recent years, many essays have been submitted to the competition, written as part of the Immortal Regiment campaign — of course, these are small studies, but it's good that children learn about their relatives, participants in the Great Patriotic War.
Schoolchildren's works are alive, written in good language, without bureaucracy, which more and more often kills children's essays with «given» and «above», clichés and idle talk.
Here, in these texts, is the result of that same patriotic upbringing, which ordinary teachers calmly and thoughtfully practice in ordinary small towns, villages and villages.
Those studies that have already passed three rounds of the competition go to the final of the competition. At the first stage, the contest staff isolate what does not correspond to the genre of historical research and does not meet the main condition: human destiny should be at the center of the work. At the second stage, experts are involved: historians, local historians, social scientists. They select the 100 best entries.
Essay Competition Contestants< /p>
Alexei Makarov, social studies teacher and competition expert, says: “For example, I was very impressed with the work on the cemetery of wounded Red Army soldiers who died in the evacuation hospital. A memorial plaque hung on its building, on which the names were listed. The author began to find out their fate, to compare with the database «The Feat of the People», and found that there are errors in the database: for example, a person is listed as missing in it, and a memorial plaque indicates that he died in a hospital. There were many such mistakes in wartime; the question is how to treat them: to cast them in granite forever or to find out the fate of specific people. I remember an amazing work from Chistopol, which did not win a prize. In the first chapter, the girl wrote that her great-grandfather, grandfather, father were the chiefs of the Chistopol prison. And in the second chapter, it was about the dissidents who were in this prison: Sharansky, Marchenko, who died in it. In this work, honest and sincere, the first part did not correlate in any way with the second: all these people were in prison, which was run by the author's relatives. In general, the works are striking in how they reflect a rich and diverse life. And not only because our country is big, but also because amazing stories fall into the field of view of the authors.
Very often we run into taboos that prevent us from understanding that people behave differently in emergency situations and from finding out the truth as it is. I remember the work devoted to the study of the collective case of 1937: the author coolly, detachedly revealed all the legal inconsistencies in this case. For today's children, this is the same distant reality as the 15th century is for us, they can already calmly work with these documents. We do not carry out such work: it is obvious to us that the person under investigation was tortured, that he was accused unfairly and he needs to be rehabilitated. And here the mechanism of this case is revealed. And I see that the next generation of researchers has come, starting to ask questions that we do not ask ourselves. And it is valuable that this generation of researchers has appeared — more impartial, more naive, not afraid of any topic.
At the third stage, the members of the jury read. At different times, they were Academician of the Russian Academy of Education Sigurd Ottovich Schmidt, writer Daniil Granin, writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya, writer, TV presenter and literary critic Alexander Arkhangelsky, TV presenter and public figure Nikolai Svanidze, radio host Ksenia Larina …
“History in a domestic way – this Pushkin formula describes the goals and objectives of the memorial competition with the utmost precision,” says Alexander Arkhangelsky. — Not to give a «correct» picture of the past, but to plunge into family memory, that's what was offered to schoolchildren, and they readily responded to it. It could be a study about the great-grandfather's military path, or it could be about letters from the time of the post-war famine. I personally remember forever how schoolchildren sang the songs they collected at the awards ceremony, and the song also turned into a fact of a great story.”
And then came the NOD, the FSB and the Ministry of Justice
Attacks on the contest began in 2016. The representatives of the NOD tried to disrupt the awarding ceremony, they interfered with the teachers and the winners, who were going to the ceremony, poured brilliant green on the chairman of the jury, Lyudmila Ulitskaya.
“At that moment, we were holding an awards ceremony for the winners of the 17th competition. We worked on a presidential grant,” says Tatyana Golubeva. — Near the entrance to the House of Cinema, a team of Nodists gathered, accompanied by NTV, led by activist Maria Katasonova, who later ran for the State Duma from the Rodina party.
In October 2016, Memorial International was entered by the Ministry of Justice into the register of “foreign agents”.
In 2017, the regional ministries of education were called allegedly from the federal ministry and demanded not to let children go to competition; the Ministry of Defense then reported that they had nothing to do with these calls.
In 2019, the finalists of the competition were already summoned to school principals, and there they were interviewed by FSB officers who strongly recommended that they refuse to participate in the Memorial competition .