The Monument to the Victims of the Explosion on August 1, 1918 in Omsk: The History of a Private Commemoration in the City Memorial Space

Abstract

The study presented to the readers is devoted to an unstudied Siberian monument associated with the period of the Civil War and long since lost. The relevance of the study is due to a rather weak scientific understanding of specifics of the development of memorial culture in Siberia at this difficult historical stage and of its ongoing influence on the modern memorial processes. The emergence and existence of the monument to the victims of an ammunition explosion on August 1, 1918 in Omsk has been traced within the frameworks of development of the Russian memorial culture and memorial space in the Siberian cities. The authors establish the monument’s origin and its fate up to its disappearance. To interpret these events, general trends in the Soviet era state policy of memory and peculiarities of the urban environment of the period are taken into account. The main sources are valuable and mostly unpublished documents and photos (including those from private collections), which are being thus introduced into scientific use. The study is oriented to the problem field of memory studies; it addresses problems of cultural memory, its formation, development, and transformations under the influence of various factors. It also uses biographical and problem-historical methods. This theoretical complex permits to interpret the half century existence in Omsk of a monument erected on a private initiative, while linking its appearance to the particular historical situation. The publication may be of interest to specialists in the field of cultural and historical memory, researchers of urban cultural space, Civil War in Siberia, urban everyday life and Omsk local history.