Story thread · 4 reports / 4 sources

Moscow’s Gulag museum won a Council of Europe prize for its honesty about Soviet terror. The state has now replaced it with a museum about the genocide of the Soviet people by the Nazis.

meduza.io · 4hShare

In late 2024, Moscow’s Museum of the History of the Gulag was temporarily closed over “violations of fire safety requirements.” Even then, it was clear that this state institution had little chance of a future in a Russia at war. Still, the museum kept operating behind closed doors. What many had feared came to pass in February 2026, when officials announced that a new Museum of Memory would open in its place, dedicated to the genocide of the Soviet people during the Great Patriotic War — hardly the most cynical move imaginable: years before the war, the Perm-36 museum of political repression was turned into a museum honoring Gulag camp workers. The independent journalists’ cooperative Bereg recently reported on what happened inside the Museum of the History of the Gulag while its fate hung in the balance, and on what replaced it. Meduza is translating the story in full.

First report: Comment | What happened to George Lucas’s vision of a museum for ‘the people’? — theartnewspaper.com, 1d