By replacing the Gulag History Museum with a museum focused on Nazi crimes, the Russian regime is shifting the spotlight on History. In November 2024, the Gulag Museum in Moscow, the only Russian public institution dedicated to the crimes of the Stalinist regime, suspended its activities, officially for violation of fire safety rules. Presented as temporary, the closure naturally aroused a certain skepticism.
Roman Romanov, director of the Gulag History Museum since 2012, was ousted in early 2025, after refusing to censor part of the “History of Moscow” exhibition on Soviet repressions. The director of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Elizaveta Likhacheva, was fired in January 2025 after publicly defending the Gulag Museum against its closure, illustrating a purge of non-aligned cultural cadres.
Very recently, the temporary suspension turned into the definitive liquidation of a museum which was awarded an award by the Council of Europe in 2021 for its work of memory. Moscow authorities have confirmed that it will be replaced by a new institution with a deceptively generic name: the Museum of Memory. Officially, the institution will commemorate the “victims of the genocide of the Soviet people” and will present itself as the first national museum of memory covering “all stages of Nazi war crimes during the Great Patriotic War”, a period during which 26 to 27 million Russian citizens lost their lives, to which must be added the 1.5 to 2 million Russians who died in the Gulag camps, people deported and soldiers executed for treason.
Moscow City Hall has entrusted the management of this Museum of Memory to Natalia Kalashnikova. A very political decision since his profile contrasts with that of the historians and human rights activists who ran the old museum. Former fighter Natalia Kalashnikova is the recipient of the medals “Participation in a special military operation” and “For contribution to strengthening the defense of the Russian Federation”. She initially headed the scientific department of the Scriabin Memorial Museum, before being appointed vice-rector of the Moscow State Cultural Institute (MGIK). In March 2025, she became director of the Smolenskaya Krepost’ Museum (Museum Fortress of Smolensk).
According to her, the existing collections will not be destroyed but placed in reserve, while the exhibition is completely overhauled. Not without a touch of irony, the new director stressed that the building will have to be checked again for fire before any reopening.
The choice of the term “genocide of the Soviet people” to describe the victims of the Nazis challenges historians. This qualification was absent from both classical Soviet historiography and international law. Its appearance in official discourse is recent. It was in 2020 that Vladimir Putin began to use the term “genocide” to designate the Nazi abuses committed against Soviet populations. The Russian president then asserts that these crimes have no statute of limitations and pleads for their international recognition as “genocide”.
In April 2025, a federal law “On perpetuating the memory of the victims of the genocide of the Soviet people” was adopted. MPs have even called for any challenge to this official historical account to be criminalized. The new Museum of Memory is therefore part of the historical revisionism promoted in recent years by the Kremlin, particularly since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022. The NGO Memorial, a pillar of research on Soviet repressions, was liquidated by the Supreme Court between 2021 and 2022. In February, Memorial was designated as an “undesirable organization”, making any involvement liable to prosecution.
Founded in 2001 on the initiative of a historian and former deportee, Anton Antonov-Oveseyenko, the Gulag Museum presented a set of archives retracing the history of Soviet repression, from the Red Terror of 1918 until the closure of the camps after the death of Stalin, in 1953. There were heavy cell doors from prisons or camps and documents such as arrest orders, maps camps scattered across Moscow. A large map listing the camps and deportation sites across the USSR was one of the central pieces of the exhibition. The place also organized temporary exhibitions, shows, concerts and conferences in tribute to the victims of the great Stalinist purges of 1937-1938.
