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ABSTRACT
This article examines the creation of memorial museums of the Gulag in (post-)Soviet Russia in ten regions: Moscow, the Solovetsky Islands, the Mari El Republic, Perm Region, Tomsk Region, the Tuva Republic, Kemerovo Region (Kuzbass), the Sakha Republic, Magadan Region, and the Komi Republic. Most of them were created between 1989 and 2015 as local initiatives, rather than as part of official government-sponsored efforts, although they were later supported (or not) by local authorities. The creation of memorial museums of the Gulag was initiated by museum workers and professional historians, immediately after the collapse of the USSR many of the founders of such museums were amateurs. Consequently, the exhibitions often presented Stalin’s repressions in specific ways that today seem ambiguous. This article takes a historical approach to analyze the process of the creation of memorial museums in (post-)Soviet Russia and their specificities.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. On December 28, 2021, the Supreme Court of Russia decided to liquidate International Memorial, and on December 29, 2021, the Moscow City Court decided to liquidate the Memorial Human Rights Center. I dwell on this further in the concluding remarks of this article.
2. Only in 2017 did the Russian Orthodox Church open its first memorial museum, at the Butovo firing range. (It is now temporarily closed.)
3. AZPR RME (Assotsiatsiia zhertv politicheskikh repressii respubliki Mari El) is a nonprofit association set up in 2004 that has existed since the 1990s alongside the Memorial Society.
4. Former ITK-36 security guard Ivan Kukushkin worked as a security guard at the Perm-36 Museum until the change of management in 2013.
5. From the author’s March 22, 2018, interview with Jan Raczynski, head of International Memorial.
6. From the author’s April 26, 2018, interview with Sholban Oorzhak, head of the Museum of the History Political Repression in Tuva.
7. This opinion, as shown by my field research, is popular among many Kolyma residents who arrived in Magadan Region after the closure of the Dalstroi Trust in 1957.
8. No interviews or archival documents speak of museums having problems with the state before then. Sometimes they had other problems—with money, visitors, and so on.