Moscow’s Gulag museum closed as Russia silences criticism of Soviet crimes (2024)

Even before Russia effectively banned political dissent following its all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Gulag History Museum in Moscow felt like it was running on borrowed time.

Protests against Vladimir Putin’s rule were routinely crushed by police violence, civil society groups were branded as “foreign agents” and opposition figures were demonised by the state and sometimes attacked, as when Alexei Navalny nearly died in a poisoning by the Federal Security Service (FSB) in 2020. Polls showed rising popularity for Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and growing ignorance of his crimes, including the creation of the Gulag, a vast network of prison camps in which two million people died.

“But here we are, sitting in a state museum to the history of the Gulag,” the optimistic director of the institution, Roman Romanov, told The Irish Times in September 2021. “We have a monument to victims of political repression, and soon we will open a memory garden here. And all this is in the centre of Moscow.”

Moscow officials closed the museum indefinitely last week on fire safety grounds, using bland administrative cover to mask a political move in a way their Soviet predecessors would have recognised.

Two officials in the capital confirmed to the Moscow Times, on condition of anonymity, that the museum had been shut down on “strong recommendation from senior Kremlin figures and people from the Federal Security Service”.

The trigger for the move may have been a “remembrance prayer” event that the museum held last month on the day when Russia officially honours its victims of political repression, even though Moscow had refused to allow public gatherings.

For years after taking power in 2000, Putin – a KGB officer from 1975-91 and head of the FSB in 1998-99 – pushed the crimes of the Soviet Union into the background of public life and focused on its achievements, above all its immense contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany. The KGB’s role in destroying the lives of millions of Soviet citizens was glossed over and the FSB was lionised by politicians and state media.

Since Putin launched a full-scale war against pro-western Ukraine, public criticism of his regime has in effect been outlawed and anything seen as besmirching Soviet glory is regarded as unpatriotic and potentially treasonous.

Some memorials to Stalin’s millions of victims have been dismantled, including many of the “last address” plaques on buildings from which people were taken to a KGB cell or directly to the Gulag. Since 2022, Russia’s prosecutor general has revoked decisions to rehabilitate at least 4,000 people convicted by Stalin’s authorities.

Russian investigative journalists working outside the country have found that more people in Russia have been prosecuted for their political beliefs under Putin than at any time since the rule of Stalin, including thousands who have been charged under draconian wartime censorship laws and accused of extremism, treason and spying.

Officials are once again urging citizens to do their “patriotic duty” by informing on anyone they suspect of subversive leanings, reviving a tradition of denunciations that many came to regard as shameful after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Moscow paediatrician Nadezhda Buyanova (68) was jailed for 5½ years last week for spreading “fake” information about the Russian army, after the ex-wife of a soldier killed in Ukraine reported her for criticising the invasion during a consultation. There were no other adult witnesses and Buyanova denied making the comment, but the woman’s testimony was enough for the court to convict the doctor.

“The sentence is monstrously harsh ... even given what is happening today,” her lawyer Oskar Cherdzhiyev told the BBC.

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