Moscow Gulag museum

Prisoners mine gold at Kolyma, the most notorious Gulag camp in extreme northeastern Siberia.

Often inmates whose destination was North (in fact, the middle of frozen nowhere) were kept in pits for the night. The temperature was -40…-50 C. During the day they built the prison camp for themselves right at the spot. Hardly a quarter of those people managed to survive until first warm season.

Gulags are part of a horrifying and incredibly painful past within Moscow’s history. The term ‘Gulag’ is an acronym for the Soviet bureaucratic institution that operated a system of forced labor camps under the rule of Stalin, and is often used today to refer to any such forced labor camp in the USSR. The concentration camps grew to great proportions during the Stalin era to “turn the Soviet Union into a modern industrial power and to collectivize agriculture in the early 1930s[1].” Prisoners included a wide range of convicts, including many who were deemed to be “enemies of the people” or political dissidents. Conditions within the camps were harsh, encompassing “endemic violence, extreme climate, hard labor, meager food rations and unsanitary conditions[2]” that led to high death rates within the camps. While the number of Gulag camps fell greatly following Stalin’s death in 1953, forced labor camps and political prisoners remained in existence in the country right up until the Gorbachev era[3].

The front entrance to the State Gulag Museum in Moscow, visible after entering through a small tunnel.

A picture of the interior of the Moscow State Gulag Museum. Features photographs, documents and installations retelling the history of the Soviet gulag system.

Many nations possess such painful memories from their history, at times of state-wide crimes committed by their own governments. While they may seem to be topics at times too sensitive and abominable to bring up, some nations, like Germany with the Holocaust, have done a respectable job with commemorating the lives of those who lost their lives and making the effort to remember these events collectively as a nation so that such terrible mistakes are never to be repeated. The Moscow Gulag Museum, a state-owned museum largest of its kind in the country founded in 2001, seeks to do exactly that and keep this memory alive in generations to come despite polarization within the country surrounding the legacy of the Gulag. As Roman Romanov, the current director of the Museum, states, the museum is “not to frighten people, it is not about death… It is to understand and feel that humans did this to other humans.”[1] As much as the Gulag Museum is about learning the structure of and horrid happneings within the Gulag labor camps themselves, it is just as much about understanding the frightening past of the human race and ways in which a city and nation can collectively reflect, repent and advance towards a more hopeful present and future. Unlike the themes of the other museums listed in this pathway, Gulags are not necessarily a 'recurring' and 'common' element witnessed in the daily lives of Moscow citizens then and today- however, it should very well be a lesson and memory that must be kept conscious in the minds of citizens today just as consistently and openly.