Poddorye Local History Museum

The Poddorye Local History Museum, at 10 Polevaya Street in Poddorye village, Novgorod Region, is popular with both residents and visitors. Its collection contains about 3000 items, mainly photographs, documents and objects related to district history. The exhibition “Peasant Hut of the 19th–20th Centuries” presents rural life from the late 19th to the first half of the 20th century. It includes agricultural tools and examples of home crafts: cooperage, basket weaving, pottery, textile weaving, carpentry, blacksmithing, and flax-processing equipment such as beaters, combs, spindle whorls, spindles, yarn reels and shuttles. The Historical Hall covers the formation and geological past of the district, nature and settlement, military settlements, the pre-revolutionary period, local participants in the Civil and Russo-Japanese wars, World War I, local youth organizations, and residents who served in the Afghan War or took part in the Chernobyl cleanup. Displays include furniture and interior objects of the 19th–early 20th centuries and currency of the 18th–early 20th centuries. A separate Hall of Memory of Victims of Political Repression opened in December 2018. It presents the tragic fates of local people affected by Soviet repression through an installation of a communal men’s prison cell with wooden bunks, a table and a plaster-wax prisoner figure, as well as an investigator’s room, personal case files, photographs and biographies donated by families. The “Great Patriotic War Hall, 1941–1945” was renewed in 2018. Displays cover major battles, their course and outcomes, and include shell cases, machine-gun belt boxes, steel helmets, Mosin rifles, a Degtyaryov submachine gun, photographs, documents, uniforms, banners and awards of Red Army soldiers and commanders. A reconstructed partisan dugout and a sleigh representing a “food convoy for residents of besieged Leningrad” are also shown, together with German weapons. All sections have explanatory texts and military-operation diagrams.