Online Exhibition on the Symbols of Friendship between the USSR and Czechoslovakia Launched

09:22, December 7, 2021

Presentation of the Sverdlovsk region and West Czech Republic twin cities project will be held on December 18

On December 18, a presentation of a virtual exhibition "Symbols of Friendship: Twinning between the Sverdlovsk region and the West Bohemian region of Czechoslovakia in 1966-1991" will be held. At the exhibition documents, photos, memories of the experience of international cooperation of the twinned cities of the two regions are published for the first time. Visitors will be able to find out when in Sverdlovsk the tram of "Soviet-Czechoslovak friendship" ran, what souvenirs the friendly plant Uralmash brought Czechoslovak comrades of the plant "Skoda", where in the Czech Republic is Sverdlovskaya street and much more.

"The exhibition project started in the year of the 55th anniversary of the establishment of twinning relations between the Middle Urals and Western Bohemia. The project consists of several thematic blocks: the history of the origins and development of twinned relations of the USSR, twinned regions and ten pairs of twinned cities. Information is based on records of the Center for Documentation of Public Organizations of the Sverdlovsk region, periodicals from 1966 to 1991, photos and artifacts from the collections of museums of the Sverdlovsk region. Some sections already have headings "Testimonies of an epoch" - reminiscences of participants of twinning relations, and also photos and souvenirs from personal archives," says the author of the project, Maria Beklenischeva, a PhD student at the Department of Documentology, Archival Science and History of Public Administration of Ural Federal University.

The presentation of the project will take place in the Innovative cultural center of Pervouralsk (Sverdlovsk region) at 11:00. To visit the virtual exhibition, press the link. The exhibition is prepared within the Russian Foundation grant "Museum of a small city: the plurality of cultures of memory (historical and sociological analysis)".

Reference

The twinned cities movement appeared in the USSR in 1943, when friendly relations were established between the Soviet city of Stalingrad and the English city of Coventry. It marked the beginning of the twinning of cities of different countries. In 1957 the World Federation of Twinned Cities was founded. In three years more than 80 Soviet cities were connected with more than 200 foreign ones. By 1970, 10 pairs of cities and districts of Sverdlovsk and West Bohemia regions were twinned: Sverdlovsk - Plzen, Nizhny Tagil - Cheb, Karpinsk - Sokolov, Beloyarsk district - Takhovsky district, Sysert district - Domažlice district, Pervouralsk - Plzen-North, Kamyshlov - Karlovy Vary, Sukhoi Log - Plzen-Yug, Bogdanovich - Rokicany, Polevskoye - Klatovy.