The M. Shmyrev Museum will launch the project "Honorary Citizens of Vitebsk - Participants of the Great Patriotic War" with an exhibition about V. Kulagina

February 18, Vitebsk / Sergey Kochetov - BELTA /. The first exhibition of the project "Honorary Citizens of Vitebsk - Participants of the Great Patriotic War" will open today at the Vitebsk Regional Museum of Hero of the Soviet Union Minay Shmyrev and is dedicated to the memory of Vera Semenovna Kulagina. The museum director Irina Shishkova informed a BELTA correspondent about this. This exhibition is organized jointly with the city and regional organizations of the public association "Belarusian Women's Union" as a sign of respect for the merits of the Honorary Citizen of Vitebsk Vera Kulagina. During the war, she led one of the groups of Vitebsk underground fighters, and in the post-war period, she worked in public administration bodies and for more than 20 years continuously led the city's women's movement. The exhibition includes archival documents, photographs from the museum's collections, as well as materials from a family archive, including 17 state awards of Vera Kulagina, documents and belongings of her sisters Anna and Maria, which were kindly provided by relatives. The authors of the exhibition tried not only to present the life path of an honored person, but also to show how the fate of women unfolded during the war, what role they played in that tragic period of the country's life, Irina Shishkova noted. The first title of Honorary Citizen of Vitebsk was awarded to the legendary partisan brigade commander Minay Shmyrev in 1964. This fact prompted museum staff to study the lives of citizens whose merits were also recognized by the awarding of the honorary title. The exhibition project will be continued by expositions about partisan brigade commanders Daniil Raitsev, Mikhail Biryulin, Nikolai Sakmarkin, as well as about active participants of the partisan and underground movement Mikhail Titov, Maria Matsenko and the Bulgarian Dobrin Dimitrov, who fought in Batka Minay's brigade and was also awarded the title of Honorary Citizen of Vitebsk. The exhibitions are dedicated to the 65th anniversary of the Great Victory and will be a kind of visual summary of the research work of the staff on the topic of Honorary Citizens of Vitebsk. The Memorial Museum of the partisan commander of the brigade, Hero of the Soviet Union Minay Filippovich Shmyrev (partisan pseudonym Batka Minay), was opened on July 5, 1969, during the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the liberation of Belarus from the Nazi invaders. It includes 4 exhibition halls dedicated to various stages of the legendary partisan brigade commander's life, as well as a park area of about 0.5 hectares. In the park area, there is a sculptural bust of Minay Shmyrev by People's Artist of the USSR Zair Azgur, and an oak alley planted by former participants of the partisan movement. -0-