Exhibits and Relics of the "Heroic Generation": Creating the Museum of the Revolutionary Movement in Bulgaria (1944–1950)

Abstract

This article examines the creation of the Museum of the Revolutionary Movement in Bulgaria between 1944 and 1950 as part of the broader process through which the early communist regime institutionalized revolutionary memory and constructed political legitimacy. Rather than treating the museum simply as a repository of historical artifacts, the study approaches it as an institution actively involved in pro-ducing an official narrative of the anti-fascist struggle. Drawing on archival materi-als from the Central State Archives, the article reconstructs the campaigns for collecting documents, photographs, personal belongings and testimonies, the organization of early anti-fascist exhibitions, and the transformation of these initiatives into a permanent museum institution. Particular attention is paid to the processes of selection, authentication, and visual representation through which revolutionary biographies were transformed into publicly recognized symbols of moral authority and political legitimacy. The article argues that the museum functioned simultaneously as a space of memory, an instrument for legitimizing the new political order, and a mechanism for producing what is defined here as the "heroic generation" ‒ a politically recognized community whose revolutionary experience became a source of symbolic capital and entitlement to power. In this perspective, the Museum of the Revolutionary Movement appears not merely as a cultural institution but as one of the central technologies through which the communist regime transformed recent history into an authoritative political past.