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Moscow’s Gulag museum won a Council of Europe prize for its honesty about Soviet terror. The state has now replaced it with a museum about the genocide of the Soviet people by the Nazis.

Source: Bereg

In late 2024, Moscow’s Museum of the History of the Gulag was temporarily closed over “violations of fire safety requirements.” Even then, it was clear that this state institution had little chance of a future in a Russia at war. Still, the museum kept operating behind closed doors. What many had feared came to pass in February 2026, when officials announced that a new Museum of Memory would open in its place, dedicated to the genocide of the Soviet people during the Great Patriotic War — hardly the most cynical move imaginable: years before the war, the Perm-36 museum of political repression was turned into a museum honoring Gulag camp workers. The independent journalists’ cooperative Bereg recently reported on what happened inside the Museum of the History of the Gulag while its fate hung in the balance, and on what replaced it. Meduza is translating the story in full.

The names of sources from the Museum of the History of the Gulag have been changed for safety reasons.

Moscow’s Museum of the History of the Gulag “tackles, with rare honesty, some of the very difficult issues about human rights, democracy and the rule of law in the 20th century.” That was the citation when the museum won a prestigious Council of Europe prize in 2021. Only three museums in Russia hold awards of this kind.

Once Covid-19 restrictions lifted, museum employees traveled to Strasbourg to collect the statuette. There, Ivan Soltanovsky, then Russia’s permanent representative to the Council of Europe, congratulated them in person. “Everyone congratulated and praised us. At that point, we [still] didn’t feel any condemnation for having done something wrong,” says museum employee Anton.

Anton says the win counted as a major achievement for the Moscow Department of Culture, which oversaw the museum: the news ran on the mayor’s website, and the statuette went on display in one of the museum’s halls. “We were full of hope and plans, and we basked in well-deserved congratulations,” he says.

In those years, the museum had no idea what pressure from the authorities even looked like, says another former employee, Boris:

The Museum of the History of the Gulag

‘I can’t say anyone disliked us’

The Museum of the History of the Gulag was created in 2001 on the initiative of the historian Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko. He was the son of the revolutionary and Soviet political figure Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, an “enemy of the people” who was executed in 1938 on charges of ties to Trotskyists and rehabilitated after Stalin’s death.

The museum initially occupied a small building on Petrovka Street in central Moscow, a space the city government provided. Relations with the Department of Culture were good, and the staff “never felt any pressure or lack of understanding,” one employee says.

Sergei Kapkov became head of the Department of Culture in 2011, and under him, Moscow’s cultural policy saw progressive reforms residents still remember fondly: the city renovated its main parks and modernized its libraries; museums and theaters got funding and new directors with ideas of their own.

Anton describes the Kapkov period as “a golden time for the museum.” Roman Romanov was appointed the museum’s new director in 2012, having previously served as Antonov-Ovseyenko’s deputy. Antonov-Ovseyenko retired at 92 but stayed on as the museum’s honorary president.

Under Romanov, the museum became one of Russia’s key memory-preservation projects. In 2013, it opened a social volunteer center to support elderly people who had lived through state persecution. Volunteers helped them around the house, took them to the hospital, and put on concerts.

That same year, the museum launched the “My Gulag” project, through which staff and volunteers recorded hundreds of recollections of Soviet repression. Later, under Romanov, the museum planted a Garden of Memory on its grounds and built a pavilion for temporary exhibitions.

With Kapkov’s patronage, the museum received a new building in 2015: a four-story house on Samotechny Lane, in the same Tverskoy district.

The building, constructed in 1906, underwent a major renovation designed by the Russian architecture firm Kontora. Architects Dmitry Baryudin and Igor Aparin came up with the idea of lining the facade with copper sheets that would oxidize over time, leaving it “gloomy and frightening.”

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin attended the opening and liked the architects’ concept, saying that “the building creates the atmosphere of those years and events.”

Kapkov left the mayor’s office in 2015, and Alexander Kibovsky ran Moscow’s culture department from then until 2023. Anton, who worked at the museum during this period, says “relations [with the mayor’s office] became a bit cooler, because Kibovsky simply wasn’t as interested in our museum as Kapkov was.”

Alexei Fursin succeeded Kibovsky in 2023. Kibovsky was arrested on bribery and fraud charges in July 2024 and sent to a pretrial detention center.

“There were warmer periods [in relations with the Department of Culture], and there were cooler ones… I can’t say anyone disliked us,” Anton says, recalling that Fursin visited the museum with his family.

The Moscow city government even renamed a tram stop 100 meters (about 330 feet) from the building in the museum’s honor.

But in early 2026, that name disappeared without any announcement or explanation. Now Moscow’s tram No. 50 stops at “4th Samotechny Lane” instead of “Museum of the History of the Gulag.”

‘A kind of fog descended’

“Everyone was bewildered and confused,” Anton recalls of February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Former museum employee Valery recalls that colleagues met shortly after the invasion began to discuss how to keep working under the new conditions — and what the “points of no return” might be, the circumstances under which employees would no longer be able to stay silent, even at the risk of the museum being shut down.

Employees who agreed to speak with Bereg say they knew the museum was a state institution and that “public statements by any member of the team could be its [the museum’s] last.”

The team decided, almost unanimously, to “continue working carefully within permissible limits,” “not make public statements,” and “focus on the museum’s subject matter” — the historical period from 1918 to 1956.

Some of the team left the museum after the war began. Several more left after Russia announced a mobilization in September 2022, and emigrated. “Every farewell felt like a small death. But then everything gradually stabilized. Everyone just buried themselves in work,” Boris says of that period.

Valery, one of the employees who left because of the mobilization, had worked on the museum’s public program and kept doing that job from abroad: “It was an incredible story. Thanks to our department’s team and our experience working together, we set up the process so that I could take part in organizing events remotely.”

The museum briefly cut back on events right after the war began, but its public program never disappeared. “We started adapting events to the new context — so that they could help people reflect on what was happening,” Valery says.

Staff kept holding lectures and posting recordings on YouTube. In February 2023, the channel featured a series of lectures by historian Ivan Kurilla on how politics shapes history; Russian authorities designated Kurilla a “foreign agent” in January 2026. The museum also staged productions, including “Gorky Slon” — a pun that reads as both “Gorky’s Elephant” and “Bitter Elephant” — about Maxim Gorky’s visit to the Solovetsky Islands.

Anton recalls that philologist and historical memory researcher Nikolai Epple and political scientist Yekaterina Schulman used to give talks at the museum. But after the war began, “it became obvious that it would probably now be difficult to organize events with their participation at state museums,” a former employee told Bereg. Authorities began labeling lecturers “foreign agents,” and many left Russia.

In the war’s first months, the museum received no “instructions from above,” employees interviewed by Bereg say. But tensions gradually rose — not just for the museum, Anton says, but for every museum under the Moscow Department of Culture:

About a year into the full-scale invasion, “informal signals” began circulating about “blacklists” that, as one employee recalls, “no one ever actually saw.” “So we don’t work with this artist, we pull that one. And why anyone had to be ignored was never explained to the museum community. A kind of fog descended,” Anton says.

But even this “kind of fog” didn’t stop the work. A significant share of the staff at the Studio of Visual Anthropology — the department that recorded interviews with camp prisoners and the recollections of Gulag staff — left after the war began, yet the studio’s main project, “My Gulag,” carried on.

Boris, who was involved with the studio, recalls: “That [preserving memories] was probably my main motivation to keep grinding, especially after the war began. And if not now, then when?”

The second book in the “My Gulag” project came out in 2024, containing transcribed recollections of people affected by Soviet repression. It included an interview with Maya Kara-Murza, the grandmother of politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who by then was already in a penal colony on charges of “treason.”

“It was meant to be a small message of sorts,” says Boris, who worked on the project.

‘Then came the crying, then the smell of valerian drops down the hallway’

The museum’s real troubles began only in the summer of 2024.

On August 20, staff received a verbal order from director Roman Romanov to shut down the website. They weren’t told who had given him the order, and no explanation followed for why it had to be done.

By that point, the website contained only event announcements, lecture recordings, information about new projects, and a guide for tracing relatives who were victims of Soviet repression.

“There was nothing dangerous or improper there. Everything was devoted exclusively to the subject of repression and life in the Soviet Union,” Anton says.

The site went dark, replaced by a banner citing “technical work.” The museum made no public comment.

Once it became clear that the shutdown was permanent and the site would not return, museum management told the team about the order it had received. Anton sees it as an “informal warning” from the Department of Culture about the museum’s future.

He believes the order reached the department “from somewhere above,” and that mayor’s office officials, in turn, asked Romanov to “shut the website down quickly” and “write whatever you want on it.”

Staff discussed whether to go public but decided against it, still hoping the Department of Culture would defend one of the city’s leading museums. “Everyone wanted to save the museum, so we didn’t leak anything [to journalists] and didn’t comment. We acted in good faith toward the Department of Culture,” Anton says.

Despite the site’s closure, the museum kept receiving visitors as usual and running its social media accounts. Management never announced a full halt to operations.

A couple of months later, in October 2024, rumors reached staff that the museum would be closed after all.

In November, inspectors from the state agency that vets construction projects in Moscow — formally, GBU TsEIIS — showed up unannounced. As Anton recalls, they “didn’t even hide the fact that they’d come to find some violation in order to close the museum.”

A few months earlier, Emergency Situations Ministry inspectors had already checked fire safety, and the museum passed. But TsEIIS disagreed with those findings, and in mid-November, the building was officially closed “due to fire safety violations.”

News of the closure surprised Emergency Situations Ministry officials, who contacted museum management after seeing it in the press. “They called us and said, ‘What’s going on over there? Closing museums over fire safety is our prerogative. Everything was fine with you,’” Anton recalls.

Staff experienced the closure “like the end of the world.” Boris recalls that Romanov told the team about the TsEIIS decision “with his characteristic optimism,” explaining that these were “such times” and that it simply “had to be endured.” “The crying started again, much as it had at our first all-staff meeting after the war began,” Boris says. “Then more crying, then the smell of valerian drops down the hallway.”

Anton believes the people who decided to close the building probably didn’t even understand what the museum did:

“When it became clear that this work was under threat, everything became very hard, very sad,” Anton says of that period at the museum. “On a purely human level, you start thinking there might never be another job like it — with such a convergence of values, meaning, professionalism, and dedication.”

Staff wondered exactly how they had displeased higher authorities. As Anton recalls, they really didn’t understand what was happening or why the museum had fallen out of favor — even though the full-scale war with Ukraine, and the crackdown on civil liberties that came with it, had already been going on for more than two years:

But that wasn’t the end. With the building closed and the website down, the museum kept up other work — staff processed the archive, recorded interviews, and ran the “My Gulag” project, among other things.

The museum even received city budget funding for 2025. Despite the frightening uncertainty, staff held on to hope that “the museum had been mothballed and would reopen once it was possible,” one employee says.

Despite the reduced workload, no one was let go; those who had worked with visitors were reassigned. “A museum is a large research organization that needs transcribers, people who scan documents and books, and people who catalog [items from the archive],” Anton says.

At the very end of December 2024, the team got more unsettling news: the department planned to remove Romanov. He formally told staff about his dismissal on the first day back after the January holidays. “He wanted to let the staff rest and have a normal life for a while,” Anton believes.

As Meduza has reported, Romanov’s dismissal may have been linked to his refusal to censor a section on Soviet repression in an upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Moscow. The Museum of the History of the Gulag was one of the participants; the section was ultimately cut from the project entirely.

Anton suspects this episode “was just a minor official’s panic” and probably wasn’t the main reason for Romanov’s removal: “For us, the exhibition at the Museum of Moscow was one of dozens we took part in with a few small texts and exhibits.”

By his own account, Anton “kept looking for logic and trying to decode hidden signs” — why, he wondered, wasn’t the museum shut down all at once?

‘We were pushed into some kind of marginal space’

At a farewell meeting, Romanov told staff his “employment contract had been terminated” and that “the museum would have a new director,” without naming the reasons. As Anton sees it, “there was no need to explain it to the team”: “Everyone understood everything.”

A year later, Romanov was removed from Russia’s Presidential Human Rights Council, where he had served since 2012.

Romanov’s dismissal after nearly 13 years in the job was another blow to staff. “He was a real visionary, and everything was built around him,” says a former employee who spoke with Bereg. A colleague agrees, calling Romanov “the soul of the whole museum.”

Anton says the team discussed resigning in protest over the personnel decision. But as before, staff decided to stay quiet — this time so as not to bring down the museum’s remaining projects, like the social volunteer center:

In the end, no one left the museum. “People kept believing we’d be saved,” Boris recalls.

Working without Romanov was frightening all the same — staff feared that without a leader who understood the work, the museum’s projects would fall apart, one former employee says. “I’m proud that we managed to keep working even without Roman, even after being decapitated,” Boris says.

About a week after Romanov’s dismissal, the museum got a new director: Anna Trapkova, who also headed the Museum of Moscow. Known as a progressive official, Trapkova began her museum career in 2014, when Sergei Kapkov — the same patron behind the Museum of the History of the Gulag — led the Moscow Department of Culture. Before the Museum of Moscow, she worked at the Pushkin Museum and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

Trapkova had a good relationship with Romanov, who personally introduced her to staff. Employees saw her appointment as “far from the worst option.”

“Trapkova is a real professional; she respected the museum, she came to our events,” Anton recalls. “[Instead of her], we could have gotten a director who would have devalued everything right away.” Boris calls Trapkova “an official with an absolutely human face”: she banned nothing and focused instead on “keeping the museum running, but quietly.”

Trapkova kept her post at the Museum of Moscow, though there was no talk of officially merging the two institutions.

At one of her first meetings with the team, Trapkova said she “understood and respected” the museum’s mission and “would do everything possible to preserve it,” staff say.

In Anton’s view, Trapkova succeeded in that task:

Even so, that year the museum was barred from any public activity. After the website, staff were told to freeze the museum’s social media accounts too. The order came from the Department of Culture, verbally, through Trapkova, former employees say. No one ever explained the bans.

“Clearly, a complete ban was imposed on mentioning the museum and on any cooperation with us,” one employee says.

Still, no order came to dismantle the exhibition. Anton recalls that people interested in the subject of repression messaged the museum on social media asking for “secret tours.” Many wanted them — some had been planning to visit the museum “their whole lives” but never made it before it closed, while others simply wanted to support staff through a difficult time.

But no one besides staff was let into the building. “We had a work schedule approved [by Trapkova]. We came in at 10 a.m. and left at 7 p.m.,” Anton says of working in the closed museum.

After Romanov’s departure and the closure, the museum lost nearly all its non-budgetary sponsors. By 2025, staff say, what had once counted as a routine task felt like “a victory and an achievement.”

“We ended up in some kind of frozen limbo. It was a traumatic experience for the whole team. We supported each other as best we could, but it was eating us up inside. We couldn’t make any plans, we weren’t given specifics, and it was hard to plan our lives,” one former employee tells Bereg.

Staff, together with Trapkova, were ready to change the exhibition — anything to get permission to reopen and keep working.

Through Trapkova, they proposed to the department, for instance, re-recording the exhibition’s audio to remove the voices that read some of the letters and diaries of repressed people. Those recordings featured actresses Liya Akhedzhakova and Chulpan Khamatova and actor Maxim Vitorgan, all of whom have publicly opposed the invasion.

Staff were also ready to rewrite wall-text wording that the Moscow Department of Culture might find “dangerous.”

It’s unclear how the department responded — officials, at least, passed along no instructions through Trapkova. “It seems the department was already busy designing the new museum, and they didn’t bring us into that. So that year, they left us alone entirely,” Anton suggests.

During that year of silence, several books that had been long in preparation came out. The museum’s own publishing house was originally supposed to release them, but after the closure, other publishers took them over and printed them without the museum’s logo.

“That kept us going — knowing that there are people who aren’t afraid to shake our hand,” Anton says of the books’ publication. “Because we’d been pushed into some kind of marginal space.”

‘The regime will come when it needs to’

In the summer of 2025, staff at the museum — by then used to working without visitors — noticed unfamiliar people walking through the exhibition, paying no attention to the staff. Asked who they were, the strangers said they worked for a company called Grata Adv. They didn’t ask the staff any questions of their own.

Tatyana Panferova, a graduate of the Moscow Printing Institute, founded the advertising agency Grata Adv in 1996. The company designs exhibition stands, museum displays, and souvenir products.

A source familiar with Grata’s work told the BBC Russian Service that after the full-scale war began, the company “found its niche” producing “patriotic exhibitions.” Grata built the exhibition for the “Young Defenders of the Motherland” museum in Kursk, designed displays for the Museum of Victory in Moscow, and helped put together an exhibition on Sergius of Radonezh at the Sergiev Posad Museum-Reserve.

For Boris, Grata’s appearance was the last straw: “I realized I’d been living in uncertainty for a year already, and everything was only getting worse — strange-looking people started showing up at the museum who didn’t even say hello, just went straight to measuring things in the exhibition. It was destroying me; I couldn’t take it anymore. I decided I’d rather remember the museum the way I loved it than watch it be torn apart.”

He soon quit:

On February 20, 2026, staff were called into the screening room. Earlier that day, the website’s placeholder page had already changed, announcing that the Museum of the History of the Gulag was closing and a Museum of Memory would take its place — one “dedicated to the memory of victims of the genocide of the Soviet people,” with an exhibition covering “all stages of the Nazis’ war crimes during the Great Patriotic War.” (This was the very exhibition Grata staff had been planning to build “turnkey” for the Museum of Memory.)

In the screening room, Nadezhda Prepodobnaya, a deputy head of the Moscow Department of Culture, and Natalya Kalashnikova, director of the new Museum of Memory, addressed the room.

Trapkova was not there. The two told staff that, effective that day, the museum was changing its concept, its name, and its director.

As Anton, who took part in the meeting, sees it, for Prepodobnaya, who had only taken office in September 2024, the Museum of Memory “became an anchor project” in which she was “personally invested.”

“What’s happening now on the battlefields and beyond — there’s a clear parallel [to the past]. And the facts on the ground show precisely that we have not fully defeated genocide,” Prepodobnaya told the surprised staff (Bereg has an audio recording of the meeting).

Trapkova kept her position at the Museum of Moscow — but in the summer of 2026, she left that post as well.

‘I hope you won’t make any sudden moves, and we’ll accomplish this state task’

Staff were especially stunned by the arrival of Natalya Kalashnikova, who had previously headed the Smolensk Fortress museum and called herself a veteran of the “special military operation,” Russia’s official term for its war against Ukraine.

“It felt surreal… As far as I understand, Kalashnikova didn’t have her own team. She was probably told that the museum already had a staff and that they’d help her there,” Anton recalls.

Before Smolensk Fortress, Kalashnikova completed the “Captains of Culture” program, a new state career pipeline for mid-level museum managers. Earlier, she headed the research department at the Scriabin Memorial Museum and worked as a vice-rector at the Moscow State Institute of Culture.

At the institute, Kalashnikova led a front-line concert brigade and claimed she traveled to the war with students almost every month — work that apparently earned her the status of a combat veteran and a medal for “participants in the special military operation.”

Under Kalashnikova, Smolensk Fortress took part in “Thank You, Heroes,” a campaign supporting Russian troops; organized meetings with people who had fought in the war against Ukraine; and, with the Defense Ministry, held an exhibition called “Faces of the Front,” displaying portraits of participants in the invasion of Ukraine.

At the meeting between staff, Prepodobnaya, and Kalashnikova, no one explained what the Museum of Memory’s new exhibition would actually be built from.

“[The new museum] had no research team working on it, and no collection of objects that would form the basis of [the exhibition],” a former Museum of the History of the Gulag employee says. “It felt like this was a completely external project that would simply be installed in the museum building, with the staff asked to maintain it. It was unclear what would be in these halls, what the narrative would be, what was even going on.”

At the meeting, as the independent Russian news outlet Verstka reported, Kalashnikova said: “I’m a veteran of combat, I travel a lot. I really hope you won’t make any sudden moves, but will just help. And we’ll accomplish this state task.”

According to the new museum’s charter, which Verstka journalists reviewed, one of the institution’s goals will be “preserving, promoting, and protecting traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.”

At the February meeting with staff, Prepodobnaya said that she was “not sure” the subject of repression would receive “due attention” in the new exhibition.

At the same meeting, staff asked Prepodobnaya and the new director what would happen to the Museum of the History of the Gulag’s collection, its volunteers, the Memory Fund, and other projects. The two said: “The museum’s collection will, of course, be preserved,” and suggested volunteers continue their work at the new museum if they “weren’t opposed.”

Prepodobnaya could not answer more specific questions about the fate of the Museum of the History of the Gulag’s projects and archives, saying only that the Department of Culture hadn’t yet thought about it: “We’ll do everything that needs to be done in accordance with the law. I wouldn’t want to put a firm period or exclamation point on this right now. This is a transitional period, and, honestly, we haven’t worked it out in that much depth.”

Staff were offered the chance to stay, but few wanted to — about half left soon after the February meeting. The rest, as one former employee who quit puts it, “probably see their goal as somehow preserving the [Museum of the History of the Gulag’s] collection, leaving it for future generations.”

In mid-March, Kalashnikova signed an order to dismantle the old exhibition. As one former museum employee told the BBC Russian Service, part of the exhibition, including specially built installations, was “simply sent to the dump”:

The Museum of Memory of the Genocide of the Soviet People

A month before the museum’s opening, “even Kalashnikova didn’t know exactly what would be in the halls,” former employees say. The reason wasn’t secrecy — it was that the exhibition was being made “in a hurry and on the fly.”

At the February meeting, Kalashnikova said the “research side” of the new museum would be overseen by Elena Malysheva, a historian and political scientist who heads the National Center for Historical Memory, a body created under the Russian president in 2023. Among the center’s official goals is “preserving and protecting traditional Russian spiritual and moral values, culture, and historical memory.”

In 2023, Malysheva said that “Russia is forming its own school of historical memory,” one in which “historical memory is what stabilizes [Russian] society specifically and answers public demand.”

The Museum of Memory officially opened on June 22, 2026. Even so, visitors are still admitted only by advance reservation.

* * *

“First say that everything here is based on historical documents, and mention our memory center!” a tall, older woman on the staff tells a long-haired young man with a name badge. He nods nervously.

At the entrance, several museum staffers stand lined up in a row, visibly on edge and conspicuously polite. Tours run only on weekdays at noon. A few minutes before one is set to start, there are almost no visitors — judging by the staff’s conversations, only a handful of people have signed up, and not all of them have shown up on time.

Guests are invited to wait in the café, though nothing is on sale there yet — not even water or coffee. At the Museum of the History of the Gulag, the café was spartan: gray walls, black metal beams, stainless steel tables. The Museum of Memory’s designers appear to have been trying for a Soviet-era snack bar, adding fake columns with hammer-and-sickle bas-reliefs and, nearby, white sculptures of Young Pioneers — a boy bugler and a girl drummer.

“This floor is very different from our exhibition,” the long-haired guide begins the tour. “It’s bright here, with lots of signs of prewar life. This is how we want to show just how instantaneous the transition from peaceful life to war can be.”

In the exhibition halls, as in the days of the Museum of the History of the Gulag, the windows are curtained and the lighting is dim.

The guide suggests watching a video of prewar life, and the footage looks unnatural — it seems to be AI slop. A museum employee confirms the video was generated from archival images. Almost every scene has the kind of glitch typical of AI: a student has three arms, and a kiosk sign that should read МОРОЖЕНОЕ — morozhenoye, “ice cream” — instead reads MОРОNЕНDЕ.

“Genocide is a very complex and contradictory word,” the guide says. He’s standing by a metal mesh screen with phrases written in large letters: “crimes against childhood,” “deportation into slavery,” “punitive operations,” “destruction of culture.”

“Someone might say that [any] war is horrific and that excesses happen, but the events of 1941–1945 were not excesses — they were a deliberate plan to annihilate the Soviet population,” he says, leading into the museum’s main theme.

On the way to the next hall, the guide talks about Göring’s “Green Folder,” the “Hunger Plan,” and other Nazi German directives that were part of Generalplan Ost.

The interactive map won’t turn on, so he has to explain without it. Visitors look bored.

“The region that was to be fully Germanized was Gotengau — maybe someone’s heard of it…”

“Crimea!” one of the guests blurts out.

“It’s often said of war: one death is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic,” the guide continues. “But our museum was created so that the death of each of the 8 million victims of the genocide of the Soviet people would be a personal tragedy for each of us.”

The exhibition centers on a fictional family, the Lebedevs: a father, a mother, and four children — two sons and two daughters, of different ages. Their fates trace how the “genocide of the Soviet people” unfolded during the war. The guide never gives their first names. Visitors can learn more about the Lebedevs from recordings made in the characters’ voices, but he doesn’t leave time to listen.

The guide briefly notes that at the start of the war, the father and older son go off to the front, while the older daughter, a student at a Leningrad medical institute, ends up trapped in the siege.

Actors play the Lebedevs, but none of their faces is familiar — with one exception: Konstantin Khabensky, artistic director of the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater, who plays the museum’s archivist and recounts the German army’s war crimes.

In 2018, Khabensky wrote and directed the film “Sobibor,” about the Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland where a prisoner uprising took place in 1943. He also played the lead role, Alexander Pechersky, the organizer of the uprising and a Red Army lieutenant.

In an interview with Meduza about the film, Khabensky said it was patriotic, but that it was “very important to me to get away from red bunting with any emblem on that red.” The creators of the new museum’s exhibition can hardly be said to have managed the same.

Other museum staff bring up the rear, hurrying along anyone who lingers to study an exhibit more closely.

The next hall covers the mass killing of Soviet civilians. A video shows the actress playing the mother describing how “entire villages were emptied, and the roads were littered with bodies.” Near the screen stands a truck, and beside it a mannequin of a Nazi in a gas mask, reaching for a teenager’s elbow. A projection on the wall next to the truck — also AI slop — shows children holding toys climbing one by one into the truck bed against a backdrop of burning wooden houses.

The guide explains that this is a “dushegubka,” or gas van. Captions cycle across the side of the truck: there were dozens of such vehicles, each could kill up to 60 people, and German troops used gas to kill not only adults but also children, including orphanage residents and patients at tuberculosis and psychiatric hospitals.

Phrases like “the small patients were killed” are set in a larger font and in red.

The tour moves on to “scorched earth” tactics, leading visitors through a corridor styled as a burned wooden house. Reliefs on the walls suggest the outlines of human bodies piled atop one another — the set designer’s attempt to show what people burned alive looked like. A mannequin in Nazi uniform stands at the corner, holding canisters.

The mannequin scenes grow larger with each hall. In one, several German soldier figures point weapons at women, children, and two Soviet servicemen — one leaning on a crutch, the other with his hands bound behind his back in barbed wire, his tunic torn across the back to reveal strips of hanging skin.

“I’ll ask you to remember some details about our characters — we’ll come back to [them],” the guide says, though with so much crammed into the scene, remembering much of anything proves difficult.

The guide returns to the definition of the term “genocide” and talks about how people were taken into slavery. He suggests looking at another interactive map of Russia to see how many people were sent to camps and where they were held.

The guide taps the outline of Ingushetia. There’s no data for that region. “I’m sorry, the Center for Historical Memory will be uploading more and more information, over time, about places connected to the genocide of the Soviet people,” the young man says, embarrassed. “Let’s look at Crimea instead” (they had managed to upload the data for Crimea).

The guide moves on to camps where captive minors were held. In the hall devoted to this, several mannequins depicting children and teenagers are seated. On a nearby wall is a stenciled sign:

“There’s a particular cynicism in the fact that camps like these were set up on the grounds of former Young Pioneer camps,” the guide continues, in the cadence of the television propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov. He then plays a video of the actor portraying the younger Lebedev son, who, in the exhibition’s telling, ended up in one of these camps.

The child says prisoners were “beaten for crying” and forced into hard physical labor. According to the boy, healthy children would vanish from the barracks — doctors took them away to use as blood donors for German soldiers.

The next section is devoted to exactly that: a rusty metal examination couch fitted with restraint straps and covered in blood. Behind it, rows of long shelves are packed with bottles of a dark red liquid standing in for blood. In the gloom, under pinpoint yellow spotlights, the scene is frightening. The museum is very cold on top of it, and the combination is genuinely terrifying.

Women’s sobbing fills the room — at first it seems like a visitor is crying, but it’s soon clear the sound is a recording. The guide reproaches Germany for knowingly violating the Geneva Conventions, which it had ratified in 1934.

“But we haven’t told you about another type of camp: the dulag,” the guide says. A separate part of the exhibition is devoted to transit camps for the temporary holding of Soviet prisoners of war. The ceiling beams in this part of the museum are wrapped in barbed wire; armed mannequins in German uniform loom over visitors. An actor playing a prisoner describes the conditions in the camp.

‘Leningrad was fighting not only for its own survival, but, as a center of Russian culture, for that culture too’

Museum guests are invited upstairs to learn about the fate of Soviet citizens taken to Germany as forced labor — the Ostarbeiters, or “Eastern workers.” The staircase up is narrow metal, and in the dim light you have to watch your step.

The first thing visitors see when they raise their eyes from the floor is a rifle barrel pointed straight at them. As usual, it’s held by a mannequin in German uniform.

The guide says that companies still active and successful today — including Siemens, Mercedes, and Bosch — eagerly used this unpaid labor, and that captive young women were “raffled off” for 10 marks a ticket. A video here features the fictional Lebedevs’ younger daughter, who was among those forcibly taken to Germany.

The next room takes visitors back to the USSR, focusing on the siege of Leningrad. The hall does its best impression of an apartment building entryway, with a wooden sled in the corner and doorbells on the wall. A passage leads into an apartment furnished with a tablecloth-covered table stacked with books. Next to a pot-bellied stove sits a mannequin of a teenage girl holding a teddy bear.

From the screen, the actress playing the Lebedevs’ older daughter talks about her experience working as a nurse. She mentions in passing the names of some real residents of besieged Leningrad, including Professor Alexei Bezzubov and Daniil Kyutinen.

“Leningrad was fighting not only for its own survival, but, as a center of Russian culture, for that culture too,” the guide says, inviting museum guests into the next hall. There’s another video there: occupying troops looting composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s estate. Konstantin Khabensky, on screen, tells how many schools, libraries, and museums Third Reich soldiers destroyed.

Visitors are then led into a hall devoted to the Road of Life, the supply route across frozen Lake Ladoga. A short film there shows how the conductor Karl Eliasberg assembled an orchestra and performed Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony at the height of the siege.

From the siege, the guide moves on to death camps, pointing to a display case holding a prison uniform and personal effects that belonged to inmates of Dachau and other concentration camps. Next to it stands a screen paired with scales and several epoxy resin discs, each containing an object.

The guide places one disc on the scale. Information about the object hidden inside it appears on the screen: it’s an award signet ring made from the gold dental crowns of concentration camp victims (it’s unclear whether this is a real artifact).

The guide shows a video with the actor playing the father of the Lebedev family — in the story, he liberates the Stutthof camp near Danzig, now Gdansk. The audience is more interested in the set pieces: this hall has several prop crematorium ovens, one hatch standing open. On a gurney is a pile of coal mixed with ash and a mock-up of a partially burned bone — a lower jaw with teeth.

The guide ends the section on the Third Reich’s crimes and defeat in front of a mannequin in a military tunic, a girl in its arms. According to a museum employee, this is a reference to the Warrior-Liberator monument in Berlin (apparently referring to the pose).

According to the museum’s curators, the theme of the genocide of the Soviet people isn’t limited to crimes committed during the Great Patriotic War: part of the exhibition is devoted to Japanese militarism. “In practice their methods were the same, but the Japanese have one distinguishing feature: biological weapons and experiments on people,” the guide says.

Visitors are tired and cold. The set pieces — bloodied white lab coats and sheets, laboratory equipment, and realistic mock-ups of human organs — no longer make an impression.

The actor playing the Lebedev father says, on screen, that Soviet forces tried to prevent the use of biological weapons against Soviet citizens and, after defeating the Japanese, found several surviving laboratories with the remains of experiment victims.

The guide finally brings the group to the last hall, a lecture room screening a film about the Nuremberg trials. Visitors take their seats; during the five-minute video, some manage to doze off.

At the end, the screen rises, revealing the final installation hidden behind it: two dozen men in suits stand behind a wooden barrier, blood dripping from their hands, while in front of them, in the mud, lie human remains and belongings.

“Pay attention to the details you saw in the execution panorama earlier,” the guide reminds them. “They’re looking at the consequences of their actions: there are the sailor’s crutches, the commissar’s insignia, the [toy] crocodile the boy was holding.”

A museum employee says the subject of the genocide of the Soviet people “isn’t talked about anywhere” except in Russia. “I want to end [the tour] with a quote from the president [Vladimir Putin]: these crimes have no statute of limitations,” the guide says, sounding oddly unsure.

“We’re a young museum — if you can, please leave a review on Yandex Maps,” an employee at the entrance says as the group leaves.

“Actually, I found a little typo,” one of the visitors says, walking up to him.

“We’ll fix it! We’re still in test mode; we haven’t ironed everything out yet.”

But the visitors don’t seem to mind: many are pleased to learn that the museum and the tour are free.

* * *

One of the architects who worked on the Museum of the History of the Gulag’s building says the closure feels like an “irretrievable loss.” But he goes on: “On the other hand, there’s even some joy in it. If they’re dealing with the museum and its legacy this way, it means everything was done right. And the institution fulfilled its function.”

Former staff haven’t yet figured out what to do next. “I wouldn’t be surprised if [my former colleagues’ next jobs] have nothing to do with museum work… Because this was a truly traumatic time,” Anton says.

“I’m not even afraid to retire anymore. Because not everyone gets a job like this in their life,” Boris says. “I understand that it wasn’t all for nothing, that I can be proud [of working at the museum], and it doesn’t matter so much anymore what happens next. Some people can go their whole lives without experiencing the kind of happiness I felt from the importance of this subject and from the team we had. We were all fanatical about our work.”

The Moscow Department of Culture, Anna Trapkova, and Roman Romanov did not respond to questions from Bereg.