In November 2024, Museum of the History of GULAG was suddenly closed, allegedly, for fire safety violations, which were labelled as “strange” by many Muscovites who believed that this was a part of a broader effort by the authorities to downplay Stalin’s atrocities. Its closure came as Russian authorities have worked to downplay Soviet-era repressions in recent years, an effort that has intensified since the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
President Vladimir Putin has regularly evoked World War II history in justifying the invasion, claiming it was needed to “denazify” Ukraine and stop “genocide” against the Russian-speaking population of partially occupied eastern Ukraine.
Today, an announcement came that the museum will at last re-open – but in a rebranded capacity, as a Museum of Memory, dedicated to the genocide of the Soviet nations by the Nazis. The newly appointed director of the museum Kalashnikova defined the mission of the new museum as “cultivating a strong rejection of Nazism in all its forms in the current generation.”
The Stalin’s GULAG system was comprised of around 30,000 labor camps. According to the estimates, between 14 and 25 million Soviet citizens were imprisoned in the GULAG between 1929 and 1953 (the year when Stalin died). Contrary to popular belief, the majority of inmates were not political prisoners but were often held for petty crimes, such as being late to work or “theft of state property” (like taking a few potatoes from a field). The low estimate of deaths in the GULAG stands at 1.5 million people, while some estimates place it much higher, up to 15 million. Stalin’s mass repressions caused mass death and suffering, affecting most families in the USSR.
In 2001, the GULAG museum was founded by one of the system’s survivors, Anton Anton-Ovsyenko, eventually becoming a large state-funded museum. Its vast collection of personal testimonies and artefacts served to document the Soviet repression and Stalinist crimes against their own people.
P.S. In the beginning of this week two European structures of the Memorial, International Memorial Association and the Zukunft Memorial were added to the list of “undesirable” organizations of Russian Justice Ministry, so they can’t legally operate in Russia any more.
The Memorial is the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the oldest organisation specialised on the history of the Soviet repressions. Andrei Sakharov was its first chairman.