The Gulag Museum

Abstract

In the final period of the communist regime, the Perm‐36 Maximum Security Camp was the last and most dangerous prison in the former Soviet Union. One of the few gulag‐era camps still standing, it has been used to house the Gulag Museum. As it exposes its story of repression, this museum is also intended to be a ‘museum of tragedy’: the tragedy of tens of millions who went through the political repression of the gulag system. But it is also the tragedy of the hundreds of millions of citizens of the former Soviet Union and socialist countries, who watched as the ideals of a just society were turned into one of the most anti‐human regimes ever devised. Since December 1998, the Gulag Museum programme has acquired international status and has been accepted as a collaborative project of the Memorial Museum of the History of Political Repression and Totalitarianism at Perm‐36. Victor Shmyrov is the director of the Memorial Museum.