In November 2024, the official website of the Gulag History Museum posted that the museum was “temporarily closed” starting November 14, “the reopening date unknown.” (RP wrote about it here). In January, it was reported that the museum’s director, Roman Romanov, had been dismissed and replaced by the current director of the Museum of Moscow, Anna Trapkova.

Published below are commentaries on the latest developments by two Russian culture commentators, published in Russian on social media (the originals are here and here).

Ksenia Basilashvili

I have already written here and here in the most laudatory terms about the first part of the Museum of Moscow’s new exhibition, “History of Moscow.” This exhibition was put together with great professionalism and love; a ton of interesting, unexpected discoveries await visitors of all ages. But we are talking about something else.

The first part of the “History of Moscow” exhibition was supposed to end with the theme of repression, as the curators had designed it. Documents and belongings of the repressed were located in the museum’s collection. They planned to tell about the Shakhty trial of 1928 (in 2000, the Prosecutor General rehabilitated all those convicted due to the absence of corpus delicti). They also planned to present the history of the House on the Embankment (the place where the Soviet elite resided, many of whom were arrested and executed during Stalin’s Great Purge – RP) and the fate of its residents.

The curators of the exhibition asked colleagues from the Gulag History Museum to write the texts for the section, as well as the labels for the exhibits. Only scientific information, i.e., facts, figures, dates. The Scientific Council of the Museum of Moscow reviewed and approved everything.

Compare two pictures from the Museum of Moscow. The first is when the exhibit was being put up. With the title and detailed texts. The second one was taken by me on December 20. Instead of words, a white wall. No documents.

The items from the House on the Embankment are now simply part of the 1930s stands. There is no section on repression. Or maybe there was no repression in the first place?

Anatoly Golubovsky

“Heading this institution, in parallel with the Museum of Moscow already entrusted to me, is a great responsibility and a serious challenge for me,” Anna Trapkova, named director of the Gulag History Museum by order of the Moscow Department of Culture on January 13, 2025, told the MoscowMunicipal News Agency.

What is this “serious challenge” and “great responsibility?” Certainly not the fire safety violations that have kept the museum closed since mid-November.

“Trapkova will have to find a compromise among the participants of the complex process that the Gulag History Museum has found itself in and rethink its concept and permanent exhibition” – this is how the popular Telegram channel Ku-ku describes the tasks facing the new director. What sort of “complex process” this is and who these unnamed “participants” are, the commentary is silent on.

But in reality, the reasons for the sudden need to rethink the concept and permanent exhibition of a museum that people go to specifically for the concept and permanent exhibition are rather obvious.

The concept of the Gulag History Museum corresponded to an important and clearly formulated document adopted in 2015, called The State Policy Concept for Perpetuating the Memory of the Victims of Political Repression. Indeed, the Gulag History Museum is one of its key realized proposals.

In June 2024, the document was amended (see RP about it here). The word “mass” [as in “mass repressions”] was taken out, with the following information also removed:

• that “Russia cannot fully become a state governed by the rule of law and take a leading role in the world community without perpetuating the memory of the many millions of its citizens who became victims of political repression”;
• about the repression of members of religious confessions and the pre revolution elite who stayed in the country;
• about forced collectivization and the resulting famine;
• about mass repressions, during which “millions of people had their lives taken, became prisoners in the Gulag, were deprived of their property and subjected to deportation”;
• about how in the 1950s and 1960s, relatives of those executed were given death certificates with fictitious dates and causes of death;
• about the rehabilitation process that resumed during the perestroika years;
• about the abolition of all repressive [legal] acts on deporting various nations [that make up] Russia;
• about government decisions that recognized the repressions from the 1920s through the 1950s as illegal and the rights of all victims of political repression as subject to restoration.

Besides the many deletions, the amended concept includes new points: for example, it now mentions the 2020 amendment to the Russian Constitution that “Russia ensures the protection of historical truth.”

In addition, the following fragment was inserted into the preamble of the concept, criticizing the decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet from September 17, 1955, that granted amnesty to Soviet citizens who collaborated with occupying forces during the Great Patriotic War:“subsequently, among other things, [it] led to the rehabilitation based on formal criteria and the whitewashing of Nazi collaborators and traitors to the Motherland who served in Baltic, Ukrainian and other punitive units, created based on nationality, and participants in underground nationalist and criminal formations.”

Could the authorities expect the Roman Romanov-led team to bring the Gulag History Museum’sconcept and exhibition in line with all these deletions? Of course not; definitely not after the Gulag History Museum won the Council of Europe Museum Prize in 2021.

“The museum’s programs are designed to expose history and activate memory, with the goal of strengthening the resilience of civil society and its resistance to political repression and violation of human rights today and in the future” – this is what the PACE Culture Committee had to say after the Moscow museum’s victory.

Apparently, the job of bringing the exhibition in line with current ideas about the history of the Gulag was entrusted to Anna Trapkova. The authorities probably have reason to trust her.

Trapkova will have to “find a compromise among the participants of the complex process.” And until she does that, the museum will not open its doors to visitors. It could take years.

A Gulag History Museum being “brought in line” is very convenient – on the surface, it is there, doing the hard work.

But at the same time, it is not there. The authorities are at ease.