Moscow’s award-winning Gulag Historical past Museum introduced its shock closure on Thursday, a transfer critics attribute to the Kremlin’s efforts to whitewash Russia’s Soviet previous.
The closure was formally put right down to alleged violations of fireplace security laws however comes amid an intense marketing campaign by Russian officers in opposition to impartial civil society and those that query the state’s interpretation of historical past.
Established in 2001, the central museum brings collectively an unlimited assortment of official state paperwork with household pictures and objects from gulag victims.
The Council of Europe awarded the positioning its museum prize in 2021, saying it labored to “expose historical past and activate reminiscence, with the aim of strengthening the resilience of civil society and its resistance to political repression and violation of human rights as we speak and sooner or later”.
An estimated 18 million individuals skilled the brutal gulag-system jail camps from the Twenties to 1953, the yr mass political arrests, deportations and executions ended with the dying of the dictator Joseph Stalin.
“The choice to quickly droop the actions of the State Gulag Museum was taken for security causes,” the Moscow metropolis tradition division advised native media. The division stated the museum may reopen its doorways as soon as it complied with security laws.
However Kremlin critics fear it’s going through everlasting closure. Russian authorities have beforehand cited hearth security issues as a pretext for shutting down independent-minded cultural establishments together with the Documentary Movie Middle in 2022 and the European College of St Petersburg in 2008.
After the autumn of the Soviet Union, Russia went via a short interval when open examination of the nation’s troubled historical past of repression was inspired and flourished. However below Vladimir Putin’s presidency, the state has sought to reshape historic reminiscence, elevating the Soviet victory within the second world warfare as a nationwide rallying level whereas portraying the pressured labour camps as an unlucky however essential byproduct.
Lately, the Kremlin has initiated a crackdown on human rights teams which have sought to chronicle the historical past of the gulag, most notably ordering the closure of Memorial, the nation’s oldest human rights group that focuses on the victims of the Nice Terror and Stalin’s repressions.
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New historical past textbooks in Russian faculties give minimal consideration to the thousands and thousands of victims of the Nice Terror, mentioning them solely in passing and omitting any detailed accounts of the brutalities they suffered.
Polls have proven that the majority Russians now admire Stalin and his legacy. Alongside his rehabilitation, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sparked a resurgence of nationalism. Throughout Russia, statues and reveals celebrating Stalin’s legacy are rising, whereas memorials devoted to victims of his repression are quietly eliminated or defaced.
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