Vasily Nikolaevich Plotnikov

Vasily Nikolaevich Plotnikov – a local historian, founder of the museum. Vasily Nikolaevich was born on January 31, 1920, in the Verkhne-Ufaleysky District of Chelyabinsk Oblast. In November 1939 the nineteen-year-old Vasily was conscripted into the army by the Polevskoy district military commissariat of Sverdlovsk Oblast. He served in the Far East (in Birobidzhan) in the 52nd Artillery Regiment and was a mortar man.

He worked at the Chernigov open-pit mine. In the 1970s he retired, took up local history and the study of the Great Patriotic War. Vasily Nikolaevich became passionate about the idea of creating a museum and involved schoolchildren in it. Together with the children he corresponded with veterans of the Great Patriotic War and his former comrades-in-arms, collecting the first exhibits that formed the beginning of the military exhibition.

 

Gradually a Room of Military Glory was established at School No. 17. It hosted lessons in courage, history lessons, and pioneer gatherings. In 1984, by order of the city executive committee of Berezovsky, a city local history museum was opened on the basis of the Museum of Military Glory. The city highly valued Plotnikov's contributions. For creating the museum, in 1988 he was awarded a diploma of Honorary Citizen. Vasily Nikolaevich passed away on February 22, 1989. The museum moved to a new building at 8A Chernyakhovsky Street in 1997. In December 2011 the museum was named after V. N. Plotnikov.