A book on the daily life of Minsk residents 80 years ago has been published

“The book allows one to look into every corner of Minsk communal apartments and workers' dormitories, walk through factory workshops, peek at figures in payrolls, jostle in store queues, inspect the contents of plates and glasses, and sit through a movie screening,” — writes the author of the publication on his Facebook page.

The book emerged as a result of the author's eight years of work and consists of 5 parts, totaling almost 600 pages. The publication contains almost 2000 references to sources, about 1600 references — to documents of the National Archive (including more than 1100 — to the main archival fund of Belarus, No. 4p "Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus") and another about 300 — to newspapers, memoirs, diaries, and letters of Belarusian writers.

“The absolute majority of archival documents have not been published or used in academic works; many of them have not been requested even once in the last 35 years. Simultaneously with analyzing a multitude of sources, I tried to keep the readers' interests in mind, adding vivid details and highlighting interesting topics, without overloading the text with excessive particulars, digressions, reflections, and evaluations,” — notes Uladzimir Monzul.

According to the author, many similar popular science and simply popular books on Soviet everyday life have been written, but they are mostly about Moscow and Leningrad/Saint Petersburg. Now, it will be possible to read not only about how life was there, but also about how life was here, especially since the specific characteristics of Belarus during this period are very noticeable.

Uladzimir Monzul emphasizes that, although he began writing the book as exclusively scientific, in the process he decided to rethink the approach and move away from dry text to hold the reader's attention. As a result, the book ceased to be a research in the strict sense of the word, “becoming an elaborate systematic description, which much better suited the popular science nature of the project.” “Since the state of national historiography and its connection with collective historical memory in many areas can be described by the idiom 'the horse hasn't even rolled' (meaning 'it's still in its infancy' or 'a lot of work needs to be done'), even such a modest contribution to correcting this unfortunate situation may prove valuable (and this, I believe, is the main task of our generation of historians),” — notes the author.

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