Russia Converts Gulag Museum to Nazi Memorial

- The new institution will be named the "Museum of Memory" and is slated to open in 2026, focusing on the "genocide of the Soviet people" and Nazi war crimes during what Russia calls the Great Patriotic War. Its mission is defined as "cultivating a strong rejection of Nazism in all its forms in the current generation." - The former Gulag History Museum was abruptly closed in November 2024, with the official reason given as "fire safety violations." However, a Moscow government official told The Moscow Times that high-ranking Kremlin and FSB officials were behind the closure and that multiple inspections had not found any fire safety issues. - The director of the new museum will be Natalya Kalashnikova, who has also been the director of the "Smolensk Fortress" museum since April 2025 and is a veteran of the war in Ukraine. The former long-time director of the Gulag History Museum, Roman Romanov, was fired in January 2025 and later removed from the presidential Human Rights Council by Vladimir Putin in December 2025. - This move is part of a broader trend of historical revisionism in Russia. In June 2024, the government's official "Concept for Commemorating Victims of Political Repression" was updated, removing the word "mass" to describe Soviet terror. Additionally, in September 2024, the Prosecutor General ordered a review to potentially overturn the rehabilitation of Soviet repression victims. - The original Gulag History Museum, founded in 2001, was a state-funded institution that housed thousands of artifacts, including letters and personal belongings of victims of Soviet repression. In 2021, it received the Council of Europe's top museum award for its contribution to understanding European cultural heritage and promoting human rights. - The Gulag was a vast network of forced labor camps that existed from the 1920s to the mid-1950s. Estimates of the number of people who passed through the camps between 1929 and 1953 are at a minimum of 18 million, with scholarly estimates of deaths ranging from 1.2 to 1.7 million. - This is not the first Gulag-related museum to be closed in Russia. The Perm-36 museum, located at the site of a former labor camp, was forced to close in 2014 after facing pressure from authorities, including funding cuts and accusations of "extremism". - The closure of institutions commemorating Soviet-era repression has intensified since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In 2021, the Nobel Prize-winning human rights organization Memorial, known for documenting Soviet-era and modern-day repression, was ordered to be liquidated. In February 2026, it was designated as an "undesirable organisation," criminalizing any involvement with it.