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Exhibition “Brothers, do not Judge Your Brother…”

On March 11, 2019, Sholokhov-Centre of the Museum-Reserve of M.A.Sholokhov will open an exhibition “Brothers, do not Judge Your Brother…” dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Upper Don rebellion.

The XX century was the time, when the events developed rapidly, and the country's population did not have time to comprehend them, to understand and accept the changes brought by the revolutions. When the new power, set up in Russia after 1917, decided that the Cossacks were to be burned in the flame of the revolution, the tough uncompromising measures caused the Upper Don rebellion raised in spring 1919.

This tragic page in the history of the Don region had long been closed for both the Cossack descendants and the whole nation. M.A.Sholokhov, who lived in the Don country and saw with his own eyes that setting of terror that caused the uprising, was the first to show all the tragedy of the events described.

“The rebellion swelled with high water, it flooded all the Don country, steppes, four hundred versts in circumference. Twenty five thousand Cossacks mounted horses. Ten thousand infantry squads of the Upper Don villages”, – we read in the novel “And Quiet Flows the Don”. The hero of the novel, Grigory Melekhov, also takes part in the rebellion.

The whole novel is permeated with humanism. M.A.Sholokhov put into the soul of his hero love and pity for all living things, impossibility to kill without great torments of conscience. The readers of the novel understood and accepted these emotions. And the direct participants in those tragic events when reading “And Quiet Flows the Don” in Russia and abroad marked the truthfulness of the events described, wrote to the author that they cried reading the novel and seeing themselves in the personages of the book. And many of them would sign under the words of Grigory: “I have a choice like in a fairy tale about bogatyrs. There are three roads with no one proper…”

The lives of the uprising participants were not easy. A part of them left for emigration and lived the rest of their lives feeling homesickness. The leader of the rebellion P.N.Kudinov was sentenced to 10 years in the camps imprisonment and ended his life in exile, in Bulgaria. Another leader of the rebellion Kh.V.Yermakov, who became the main prototype of Grigory Melekhov, was shot and only in 1989, was rehabilitated.

The exhibition project will present the exhibits from the collections of the National M.A.Sholokhov Museum-Reserve, the Rostov Region Museum of Local History and the Novocherkassk Museum of the Don Cossack History. The visitors will see genuine personal belongings of the participants in those events, weapons, documents and photos of the rebellion parties involved.

The exhibition will run during March 11 – May 26, 2019, in Sholokhov-Centre of the Museum-Reserve of M.A.Sholokhov.

Irina Panchenko