Review of the Book: Chelyabinsk at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: Memories by A. N. Neapolitanova. Chelyabinsk: State Historical Museum of the Southern Urals, 2021. 375 p.

The book presents the reminiscences of Anna Nikolaevna Neapolitanova, who was born and lived most of her life in Chelyabinsk. Her memoirs stand apart from others that tell about the Chelyabinsk past of their authors. At present, these are the only published memoirs belonging to a person who was raised in a religious family, in which both parents were children of famous priests. And this is a woman’s point of view, unlike others. Child’s memory had preserved fragments of events from the family history of early childhood including those that occurred as a result of the anti-Bolshevik uprising by the Czechoslovak Corps in Chelyabinsk. Later the family left with the White movement units retreating east towards Irkutsk, and then returned to the Soviet city. Quoting excerpts from diary entries allows one to look into the inner world of Soviet teenagers of the 1920s, who retained fragments of pre-revolutionary Russia in their memory. The teenager’s keen eye captured everything interesting: the characteristics of new acquaintances and friends; fashion and personal wardrobe; holidays and leisure; the repertoire of cinemas and theatres, etc. Subjective recollections allow the reader to see what the city’s infrastructure looked like; how the urban toponymy and locations changed; how the Orthodox developed relations with the new government and representatives of other religions; the way festive pantheon changed, and so on. The memories end in 1930.