Reopening of Moscow’s GULAG Museum as Museum of Memory Intended to Prevent Any Comparisons between Stalin’s Time and Putin’s, Sarkisyan Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 23—Nearly two years ago, the Russian government closed the Moscow GULAG Museum, supposedly for renovation; but now instead of reopening it, the powers have replaced it with a Museum of Memory, one with an entirely different purpose and an entirely different message, Dzhulietta Sarkisyan says. 

            The GULAG Museum had focused on Stalin’s crimes; but its replacement will, in the words of its new management, “be devoted to the memory of the victims of the genocide of the Soviet people” and its exhibits will trace “all stages of  the military crimes of the Nazis in the Great Fatherland War,” the journalist says (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/02/23/zabudte).

            More to the point, Sarkisyan continues, the replacement museum, which is now headed by a veteran of Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine, won’t devote any time or space to Stalin’s activities but only to those of the Nazis. The museum will send its holdings to the archives and dismiss those who made the museum such an important phenomenon.

            All this “creates the impression that talk about the mechanisms of terror – snitches, ‘enemies of the people,’ a punitive bureaucracy, closed courts and fear – is too easily viewed as a mirror of contemporary life and that those who too the decision about the closure of the museum understood this perfectly,” the journalist says.

            By this action, she continues, “the state is step by step changing not the details but the very conditions on which society is allowed to talk about repressions.” People will no longer be able to count on institutions like the GULAG Museum to help them recover their pasts but have to mouth whatever the decisions come down “’from above.’”

            And thus the closure of the museum is part of the process the Putin regime has launched to revisit and annul the rehabilitation of Stalin’s victims, a process intended to cast doubt on the entire narrative concerning Stalin’s crimes, and instead encourage Russians to conclude that they should blame all losses not on their own leaders but on foreign aggressors.