An estimated 20 million people accused of plotting against Soviet Union power died during Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror. The gulag – the system of prisons and labour camps in the USSR – was an instrumental part of Soviet state machinery from the 1930s to the 1950s. Its internment of millions of people shaped 20th-century Russia with a culture of fear.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, internment in the gulag – also the name of the administrative department that ran the camps – reduced drastically.
Nearly 40 years on in 1991, the USSR collapsed, and in 2004, Anton Antonov-Ovseenko (1920-2013), himself a survivor of the gulag, opened a museum dedicated to the history of the Soviet labour camp system.
In October 2015, the museum reopened in a new location, under the directorship of Antonov-Ovseenko’s protege, Roman Romanov. The displays evoke life in a Soviet labour camp through items such as the personal effects of prisoners, as well as details about the living conditions, such as the dimensions of prison cells.
What are the aims of the museum?
It is a museum of memories, dedicated to an event that left a traumatising trace in human memory. Its move last year to a building four times larger than the previous one means we now have a professional, modern museum with interactive displays.
As a museum about the gulag, what challenges do you face?
Our main mission is to highlight the problem of commemorating the past, of rethinking it and of better understanding future challenges. The museum is intended as a platform for public presentation, and for studying and discussing the most relevant aspects of the history of mass repression, forced labour and political unfreedom in the USSR.
What has improved since the move?
The first exhibition in the new building opened last October. Our new premises comprises separate areas to accommodate permanent and temporary exhibitions, a cinema, data storage, a research facility, a studio of visual anthropology, a public library, as well as social and volunteer centres.
A garden of remembrance will open to the public in 2016, which will be filled with trees, bushes and stones from former labour camp locations, as well as those planted by former victims of political repression. It will be a place of contemplation after visitors have been immersed in depressing gulag history.
What can visitors see?
An exhibition titled The National Remembrance of the Gulag, which is organised as a chain of altering exhibition areas that represent recollections of people who experienced the epoch of political repression.
The central part of the show includes clothes, documents, photographs, and “voices” of witnesses from the collections of dozens of Russian museums, all associated with the gulag’s history. A map of the USSR with locations of labour camps, camp administration, and the number of prisoners in different periods marked on it shows the sheer geographical span of Stalin’s camps.
There are also video interviews with people who fell victim to repressive Soviet policy and were sentenced to imprisonment in labour camps.
What do you hope people will gain from a visit?
I want visitors to leave with the feeling that this tragedy should not be repeated in any form.
What object do you find most captivating in the museum?
My favourite item is a photo from 1937 of an 11-year-old girl, Irina Grosblat. Two days after the photo was taken, her mother was arrested and sentenced to five years of work in a bread-baking plant. Her crime: being the wife of a traitor. She took the photo of Irina to the labour camp and hid it underneath the insole in her shoe. When she returned to Moscow in 1954, the photo was kept in her family and in 2008 Irina herself gave a copy of it to the museum. We also have handmade masks on display, which I find touching, yet frightening. Gulag prisoners made them from old padded jackets to help protect their faces in the -40 to -50 degree cold and wind during the many hours of enforced labour.
What does the future hold?
More learning programmes, as well as expanding our My Gulag project, which records objects and interviews from anyone formerly involved with the gulag, anyone from prisoners, their families, to officers.
Roman Romanov is the director of the Gulag History Museum
Cost of exhibition 350,000€
Main funder Moscow Government
Architects Buro Kontora; Dmitry Bariudin; Igor Aparin
Art director Lyosha Kritzook
Woodworks Sasha Yermilov
Modules RiA Luzhniki
Admission 300 Russian Rubles (about £3)
Exhibition ends September 2017
After Stalin’s death in 1953, internment in the gulag – also the name of the administrative department that ran the camps – reduced drastically.
Nearly 40 years on in 1991, the USSR collapsed, and in 2004, Anton Antonov-Ovseenko (1920-2013), himself a survivor of the gulag, opened a museum dedicated to the history of the Soviet labour camp system.
In October 2015, the museum reopened in a new location, under the directorship of Antonov-Ovseenko’s protege, Roman Romanov. The displays evoke life in a Soviet labour camp through items such as the personal effects of prisoners, as well as details about the living conditions, such as the dimensions of prison cells.
What are the aims of the museum?
It is a museum of memories, dedicated to an event that left a traumatising trace in human memory. Its move last year to a building four times larger than the previous one means we now have a professional, modern museum with interactive displays.
As a museum about the gulag, what challenges do you face?
Our main mission is to highlight the problem of commemorating the past, of rethinking it and of better understanding future challenges. The museum is intended as a platform for public presentation, and for studying and discussing the most relevant aspects of the history of mass repression, forced labour and political unfreedom in the USSR.
What has improved since the move?
The first exhibition in the new building opened last October. Our new premises comprises separate areas to accommodate permanent and temporary exhibitions, a cinema, data storage, a research facility, a studio of visual anthropology, a public library, as well as social and volunteer centres.
A garden of remembrance will open to the public in 2016, which will be filled with trees, bushes and stones from former labour camp locations, as well as those planted by former victims of political repression. It will be a place of contemplation after visitors have been immersed in depressing gulag history.
What can visitors see?
An exhibition titled The National Remembrance of the Gulag, which is organised as a chain of altering exhibition areas that represent recollections of people who experienced the epoch of political repression.
The central part of the show includes clothes, documents, photographs, and “voices” of witnesses from the collections of dozens of Russian museums, all associated with the gulag’s history. A map of the USSR with locations of labour camps, camp administration, and the number of prisoners in different periods marked on it shows the sheer geographical span of Stalin’s camps.
There are also video interviews with people who fell victim to repressive Soviet policy and were sentenced to imprisonment in labour camps.
What do you hope people will gain from a visit?
I want visitors to leave with the feeling that this tragedy should not be repeated in any form.
What object do you find most captivating in the museum?
My favourite item is a photo from 1937 of an 11-year-old girl, Irina Grosblat. Two days after the photo was taken, her mother was arrested and sentenced to five years of work in a bread-baking plant. Her crime: being the wife of a traitor. She took the photo of Irina to the labour camp and hid it underneath the insole in her shoe. When she returned to Moscow in 1954, the photo was kept in her family and in 2008 Irina herself gave a copy of it to the museum. We also have handmade masks on display, which I find touching, yet frightening. Gulag prisoners made them from old padded jackets to help protect their faces in the -40 to -50 degree cold and wind during the many hours of enforced labour.
What does the future hold?
More learning programmes, as well as expanding our My Gulag project, which records objects and interviews from anyone formerly involved with the gulag, anyone from prisoners, their families, to officers.
Roman Romanov is the director of the Gulag History Museum
Project data
Cost of exhibition 350,000€
Main funder Moscow Government
Architects Buro Kontora; Dmitry Bariudin; Igor Aparin
Art director Lyosha Kritzook
Woodworks Sasha Yermilov
Modules RiA Luzhniki
Admission 300 Russian Rubles (about £3)
Exhibition ends September 2017