Stories of native people and places. What else did the participants of the children's partisan readings talk about
December 11, 2025
The National Archives is hosting children's partisan readings as part of the "Archives to Schools" campaign, a BELTA correspondent reports.
Sviatoslav Kulinkov, Deputy Director of the National Archives and Candidate of Historical Sciences, said that the idea of holding children's partisan readings arose last year. "In the year of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Belarus, we wanted to create an event that would stimulate interest in the heroic history of the younger generation. We thought that the archive is a platform where children can implement their research projects. Within the framework of this conference, many came here and worked with primary sources, original documents, to write their papers. Our main task is to foster a sense of patriotism in schoolchildren and students. It is gratifying to note that the conference is growing both in terms of quantitative composition and geographically. If last year students from Minsk schools participated, then this year children from regions and provinces have arrived. The project has entered an international format: schoolchildren from Perm, Yekaterinburg, and Petrozavodsk have joined us," he said.
Oleg Voynov, Director of the Department for Archives and Records Management of the Ministry of Justice, added that the number of participants in the readings has increased by almost 50% this year.
When the applications were collected, the organizers were surprised that a third of the reports were dedicated to family stories. "This is great, because any history begins with one's family, one's small homeland. The children had the opportunity to further study the fates of their loved ones and tell their peers about it," noted Sviatoslav Kulinkov.
Yasmin Nasr, a student of the Fanipol Gymnasium named after A.I. Gurin, will present a report about her great-grandfather. "The idea for the research came after we flew to visit my grandmother in the Urals. There we saw a photograph, and began to search for information about my grandfather in the archives and on the internet. We managed to gather information about his combat path. He was wounded and fought until the end of the war. It was important for me to preserve the memory," shared the participant.
From the same gymnasium, tenth-grader Anastasia Maksimenko is participating in the conference. Her work "Genocide of the Belarusian People" is about the atrocities of the fascists on the lands of her native Dzerzhinsky district. "In the Dzerzhinsky district, 84 villages were completely or partially burned down, three of which shared the fate of Khatyn. People fought, went through a very difficult path so that we could have the life we have now. Future generations need to remember this," she is confident.
Vladimir Dyadichenko, a student of the Minsk State College of Digital Technologies, will talk about his relatives at the conference. "My three great-grandfathers were a writer, a partisan, and a Red Army soldier. I believe that without the past, there is no present; one must know it to move forward," he emphasized.
The conference became a logical continuation of a series of events held in the archival industry in the year of the 80th anniversary of Victory. In 2025, two books of the same-titled series "Partisan Archive" were published: "Partisan Life" and "Women in the Partisan Movement of Belarus." This series will be continued in 2026. In September, the second international conference "Partisan Archive" was held.