Abstract

The approaching 150th anniversary of the State Historical Museum is the best occasion not only to commemorate the names of outstanding scientists and organizers who stood at its origins, but also to pay tribute to the ordinary museum workers, who all contributed to its development and success. The article sets the task of reconstructing the biography of Lyudmila Petrovna Minarik, a long-term museum employee. Her bibliography is not large due to her professional path. Most of the scholarly results of her work were realized in short-lived exhibitions or permanent exhibition of the museum anonymously developed. Taking into account the deep scientific foundation of the State Historical Museum’s exposition, it might well be recognized as a historiographic fact, since the exposition is not just a collection of exhibits, but it conveys deep meanings, based on the analysis conducted by the group of scholars. Reconstruction of the L.P. Minarik’s biography is complicated by the absence of her personal archive, i.e. the sources of personal origin that allow revealing the evolution of her scientific laboratory. To fill these gaps, the research involves documents from the departmental archive of the State Historical Museum. Along with L.P. Minarik’s personal files during the period when she was postgraduate and research assistant of the museum, the author analyzes the records of the State Historical Museum for the period 1955-1993: annual plans and activities reports of the Museum and its departments, minutes of meetings of the Academic Council of the Museum and thematic plans of exhibitions. The author examines the documents relating to the accounting of research requests in the Written Sources Department of the State Historical Museum for the same period to determine the range of documents from the Museum collection, which were involved by L.P. Minarik while preparing exhibitions and writing her scholarly articles. She traces the milestones of the L.P. Minarik’s professional path and identifies the main directions of her activity: museum exposition, research and collection. The article also attempts at characterizing their internal contents on the basis on the documents involved in the research.