The Museum Visitor Book as a Means of Public Dialogue about the Gulag Past: The Case of the Solovki Museum

Abstract

The Museum Visitor Book as a Means of Public Dialogue about the Gulag PastThe Case of the Solovki Museum Zuzanna Bogumił (bio) There is common agreement that history museums are deeply engaged in transforming history into identity, because they create a public space where “personal, private or autobiographical narratives come into contact with larger-scale, collective or national narratives in mutually inter-animating ways.”1 It is thus very important to establish how museums affect the visitor’s memory and perception of the past on display. Visitor books in museums, where visitors can share their feedback and impressions of exhibitions, offer a space to present their views on the issues discussed in the exhibition.2 Moreover, they confirm that visitors are not mute observers but active participants in a public dialogue.3 As a specific source, visitor books do not offer [End Page 315] a full understanding of social memory. However, they shed light on how the perception of the past has changed among museum visitors: what they paid attention to and what they agreed or disagreed with. The role and function of visitor books differ depending on the cultural and historical contexts.4 As the extant research shows, since the 1960s visitor books fulfilled the role of a virtual public sphere in the Soviet Union.5 Soviet citizens actively and willingly responded to the exhibitions they visited, and their responses reveal the diversity of opinions that existed in society. Since one of the roles of Soviet museums was to educate society in Soviet culture, the responses in visitor books show how effective this education was.6 When the Soviet Union collapsed and the political system changed, museums in Russia, especially historical ones, had to reconceptualize their mission and goals.7 As a consequence, the visitor books also changed. They still play an important role of intermediary in the communication between visitors and museum staff, but they are also a valuable historical source, reporting tool, and a tool for the formation of the museum’s image.8 In this article, I refer to the reflections noted in visitor books by those who visited an exhibition on the history of the Solovetskii Special Purpose Camp (abbreviated as SLON in Russian) in the Solovki State Historical, Architectural, and Natural Museum-Reserve, to show how they participated and still participate in forming memories of the Gulag on the Solovetskii Islands in the White Sea in northern Russia. The visitor books from the museums on the Solovetskii Islands are a unique source of data for analyses of the attitude of the Russian audience toward the repressive past. The archipelago played an important role in the formation of the Gulag system and later in constructing memories of the Soviet past.9 Many historians and memory researchers regard the Solovetskii Islands [End Page 316] as a prism for understanding broader processes taking place in Russia.10 Moreover, the archipelago played important role in discovering memories of the Gulag in the late 1980s. Many well-known and appreciated former camp prisoners, such as Dmitrii Likhachev, visited the islands and shared their experiences of the SLON; movie and documentary makers came to Solovki to make documents that bring the camp story closer to society;11 and the Solovetskii stones became important carriers of memory and were located on significant sites, such as Lubianka Square in Moscow. Finally, one of the first historical exhibitions telling the history of the Gulag in the USSR was opened on the archipelago. This exhibition, SLON—Solovetskii Special Purpose Camp, opened in 1989 and was displayed in the Solovetskii Kremlin (fig. 1). It closed in 2008, and a new, revised exhibition, Solovetskii Special Purpose Camps 1920–1939, opened in 2010 in a reconstructed former camp barrack located on the main street of the Solovetskii settlement.12 In the article, I analyze selected visitor books from both exhibitions in an attempt to understand how visitors reacted. I ask the following questions: What did they write about and how? What did they pay attention to? Was it the history of the event, the fate of the prisoners, the memory of repressions in Russia, or personal family stories? Family stories are particularly interesting because, as Veronika...