One of the narratives reflected in the Museum’s Soviet-era exhibition was “the unity of the peoples of the USSR in the fight against the Nazi invaders – at the front, in the rear, and during occupation.” Among the exhibits that told the story of the partisan movement, interpreted in accordance with the political situation of the time, was a set of wooden chess pieces, transferred to the fund collection in 1980.
The playing set belonged to Oleh Koshovyi, one of the members of the Komsomol organization “Young Guard”. An underground cell that operated during 1942–1943 in the territory of the German-occupied city of Krasnodon, Voroshilovgrad region of the Ukrainian SSR (now the city of Sorokyne, Luhansk region). The “Young Guard” carried out sabotage and propaganda work. Koshovyi joined the organization in November 1942, and was soon elected secretary of its committee. However, in January 1943, the group was exposed and some of its members were immediately arrested, and Oleh Koshovyi, together with several underground members, were captured while trying to cross the front line. Soon they were shot in a forest near the town of Rovenky.
Later, this particularly unremarkable story, thanks to the literary talent of Oleksandr Fadieiev, the author of the work of the same name, and the efforts of Soviet historiography, became indicative in the matter of ideological heroization of the activities of the communist underground and partisan formations in the Ukrainian territories in particular and in the USSR in general. Despite the already noticeable discrepancies and questionable moments, the Stalinist regime resolved all issues with its inherent “ease” - it crossed out one of the leaders of the organization, Viktor Tretiakevych, from the list of mentions, and threw Olha Liadska, a young girl who, by chance, became involved in the “Young Guard” and was branded a traitor by a party writer, into the gulag.
However, the events surrounding this story increasingly indicated a falsification ordered by the Kremlin: the circumstances of the publication of the novel, Fadieiev ’s later life and death; the discovery of unsightly facts in the biographies of Oleh (who, by the way, became the focus of Soviet historiography only after the publication of a work based on his mother’s memoirs) and Olena from the Koshovyi family, etc.
Today, Ukrainian researchers express doubts about the scale of the “Young Guard’s” activities, scattered evidence has been found that the organization could have been used "in the dark" by German intelligence, and even suggest that the impetus for the Young Guard myth could have been the activities of the nationalist Ukrainian underground in the Donetsk region led by Yevhen Stakhiv.