Stones at War: The Chelyabinsk War Exhibition of 1946 and Soviet Environmental Thought

Abstract

One year after the German surrender in World War II, an exhibition about the “Great Patriotic War” opened its doors in the regional museum of Chelyabinsk. The curators presented the visitors with a geological take on the war events: the exhibition employed a geological time frame, which started with the genesis of planet Earth, and displayed a large introductory section on natural resources of the Southern Urals, the museum’s home region. The exhibition makers reasoned that the Soviet war effort was inextricably linked to the region’s inanimate environment with its rich deposits of minerals and metals. Based on archival documents and published sources, this article explores how a narrative focusing on minerals and metals could find a place in an exhibition about the Soviet war effort. It argues that the museum director’s personal background as an earth scientist, the short-lived regional diversity of war memory in the postwar Soviet Union, and a particular vein of environmental thought that was widespread in Soviet and international geology influenced this remarkable exhibition.