Russia’s last major independent memorial to Stalin’s victims closed in November 2024. Today, a museum about Nazi war crimes opened in its place.

A new Memory Museum opened in Moscow on June 22, becoming what the Russian state news agency TASS described as the country’s first “scientific, educational, and public center” dedicated to documenting fascist crimes against civilians during World War II.

The museum, devoted to the memory of victims of the “genocide of the Soviet people,” occupies a building on First Samotechny Lane — the same site that housed the Gulag History Museum until the fall of 2024.

Government officials attended the opening ceremony, timed to coincide with the 85th anniversary of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. The museum opens to the public on June 23.

“I’m thrilled that we now have a place like this, with the chance to reach young people — and really audiences of all ages and backgrounds — with very difficult content, through contemporary language and genuinely advanced museum techniques,” said Olga Lyubimova, Russia’s culture minister.

Her predecessor, Vladimir Medinsky, now an aide to the Russian president, called the new museum “a place that tells the story of those pages of our history that we never talked about publicly.”

Further reading

‘The end of a life cycle’ How the Russian authorities are ‘quietly dissolving’ the Gulag History Museum after its director refused to censor an exhibition on Soviet-era repressions

a year ago

Further reading

‘The end of a life cycle’ How the Russian authorities are ‘quietly dissolving’ the Gulag History Museum after its director refused to censor an exhibition on Soviet-era repressions

a year ago

Sergei Novikov, head of the public projects department at Russia’s Presidential Administration and the official the Kremlin has tasked with censoring the arts, said today’s multimedia technology meant the museum would give young people “just the inoculation against neo-Nazism they need, since the parallels with today are obvious.”

Russian authorities have increasingly invoked the concept of the “genocide of the Soviet people” in reference to Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. No such legal concept existed during the Soviet era. Since around 2020, however, it has been actively promoted by Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Russian Investigative Committee. Russian courts have already recognized the Siege of Leningrad and the mass killings of Soviet citizens during World War II as genocide. In 2025, Russia passed a law “On Perpetuating the Memory of the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People,” and in 2026 introduced criminal liability for denying or justifying the genocide of the Soviet people, with penalties of up to three years in prison for denial and five years for justification.

The exhibition covers 18 thematic sections spread across 1,700 square meters (almost 18,300 square feet).

A TASS correspondent described the exhibition modules as covering the origins of Nazi ideology, punitive operations on the territory of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the horrors of the Siege of Leningrad, crimes against children, the forced deportation of civilians for labor, the destruction of cultural property, and materials from the Nuremberg trials.

The museum also features several immersive installations, including a reconstruction of a prisoner transport car and a recreation of a room from the Siege of Leningrad.

The state agency TASS published a photo report from the exhibition.

The Gulag History Museum, on whose site the Memory Museum now stands, suspended operations in November 2024. It had long been considered the only major institution dedicated to preserving the memory of victims of Stalinist repression that operated without state pressure.

The official explanation for the museum’s closure was “fire safety violations.” But in early 2025, Moscow’s Culture Department pushed out Roman Romanov, the Gulag History Museum’s director, after he refused to remove a section on Soviet repression from an exhibition called “History of Moscow,” according to a Meduza source. Officials subsequently “decided to liquidate the Gulag History Museum gracefully and attach it to the Museum of Moscow,” the source said.

Plans to build the Memory Museum on the site became known in February 2026. That spring, most of the former museum’s staff resigned, and the previous exhibition was dismantled and all its objects were sent to storage.