Abstract
I started my research into the Soviet popular mind long ago, while still living in the Soviet Union. Working in the 1980s as a guide at the Museum of Revolution in Leningrad (now Saint-Petersburg), I lectured various groups of visitors: students and schoolchildren, Soviet Army soldiers, and guests from the Russian provinces. Their questions and reactions to the story of the Russian Revolution and Bolshevik politics stimulated my thoughts about how Soviet reality and history were interpreted in the mass consciousness. People asked: Did Lenin get funds for the revolution from Germany? Why did Lenin have no children? On what funds did the Bolshevik Party exist before the revolution? Was Stalin a tsar’s security police secret agent? I remember the shrill, loud voice of a Pioneer girl: Why did the Bolsheviks shoot the children of the tsar? People clearly were not satisfied with the official version of history, and neither am I. The collective imagination constructed an alternative picture of Soviet politics.
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© 2013 Olga Velikanova
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Velikanova, O. (2013). Introduction. In: Popular Perceptions of Soviet Politics in the 1920s. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030757_1
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