Today, the War Museum celebrates a milestone—50 years. On October 17, 1974, the National Museum of the History of the 1941–1945 Great Patriotic War was inaugurated in the former Klovsky Palace. Anniversaries are always an occasion to reminisce on the past, reconsider the present, and contemplate the future.
We would like to express our gratitude to all the museum employees who have contributed to the creation, development, and maintenance of this monument of European and world culture. Over the past 50 years, the Museum has hosted 537 exhibitions, welcomed more than 32 million visitors, and collected over 406 thousand artifacts. These achievements are a testament to the hard work and dedication of the talented and professional specialists whose names will be forever remembered in the history of the Museum.
Today, we feel the need to report to society about the current generation’s work in the War Museum during a full-scale war for the first time in 50 years. The Museum now includes numerous new exhibition projects, the successfully implemented Trident of the Motherland project, 24 expeditions to the de-occupied territories, international projects in 15 countries on three continents, and the annual Surma War Music Fest.
A vital feature of the War Museum today is redefinition in the broadest sense of the word. This means open communication with society, a new approach to exhibition and research, active cooperation with the international community, expansion of the field of activity, creation of new exhibition spaces, changes in the institution’s structure, renewal of infrastructure, and much more.
What will its next 50 years look like? The Museum of Our Dreams is competitive, modern, integrated into the international museum community, technological, inclusive, creative, dynamic, and open to cooperation. This is how we see it; we are doing everything possible to achieve this goal.
Our current priorities are:
- build a permanent exhibition that will tell about the centuries of Ukrainians’ armed struggle for independence—from the First World War to the russian-Ukrainian war, because the world wars were stages in the struggle to establish our statehood and the nation’s identity.
- research and rethink the history of the Second World War because we draw experiences and lessons from it that are relevant to our present.
- establish the Museum as a place to form memories about the russian-Ukrainian war and the heroism of the Ukrainian people, and at the same time, a place to honor the future victory that we all believe in.
Let’s preserve the past, change the present, and create the future!
Glory to Ukraine!
Yurii Savchuk
Director General