The official name of the museum is “Tragedy and Valor of Afghanistan” and “In Foreign Wars.” It was created in the form of a small exhibition in the spring of 1992 in Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War (under the statue Motherland). The exhibition was dedicated to participants in armed conflicts and local wars in which the USSR army took part, but the main part of the exhibition was occupied by exhibits on military operations in Afghanistan.
The opening of the exhibition was preceded by long and painstaking work to collect and complete the stock collection of the future museum. Employees of the main USSR memorial visited not only most regions of Ukraine, but also the republics of the former USSR – they even visited Afghanistan itself. As a result, the exhibition became the largest of all similar collections of that time in the CIS and remains so to this day.
For the 10th anniversary of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, namely in 1999, the employees of the memorial complex, based on the existing exposition, created a permanent exhibition in a separate building, which became known as “Tragedy and Valor of Afghanistan.” The museum consists of 2 halls and has more than 5,000 exhibits. Outside the building there is an exhibition of military equipment of that time.
This is interesting!
1. Until the early 1990s, soldiers killed in Afghanistan were buried without special honors or distinctive signs – often even on monuments it was forbidden to indicate that the person died in that war.
2. Almost half of the participants in the war in Afghanistan needed help from professional psychologists due to the so-called “Afghan syndrome.”
3. Not all those who returned from there were able to live as before. This is evidenced by a letter from a former soldier to a newspaper “- You know, if they were now to send out a cry across the Union: “Volunteers! Back to Afghanistan!” – I would have left… Instead of living and seeing all this crap, these snickering faces of office rats, this human anger and wild hatred of everything, these stupid, useless slogans, it’s better to go there! Everything is simpler there “.
A lot of documents, photographs, posters, letters, newspapers and personal belongings of soldiers, which can be seen in the museum, help to recreate the atmosphere and political situation in the USSR at that time, expose those responsible for starting this war, demonstrate its consequences, and also realize valor and heroism ordinary participants in hostilities, who often walked under bullets against their will…
Where is the exhibition of military equipment from the Afghan war?
Lavrskaya street, 27