News of the liquidation of the Gulag History Museum in Moscow was long-awaited and sad. But the announcement that it will be replaced with a museum of the “genocide of the Soviet people” is a horrific sign of the Kremlin’s instrumentalization of Russian history. 

On the way out of the Gulag History Museum, visitors were invited to write their own ending to the phrase "There will be no repeat if I…"

But history has repeated itself. True to the authorities’ mendacious style, the museum was allegedly closed temporarily for fire safety violations. Yet it was immediately clear that it would never reopen; no flame can ignite in today’s suffocating atmosphere.

When I think of the museum, the first thing I think about is all of the doors. Doors behind which lay hell and kept prisoners closed off from the world. Prison cell doors brought from Butyrka and Vladimir Central — heavy, patched with metal sheets, with little windows, washed in blood, tears and vomit; doors delivered from former camp sites in Dalstroy and the Krasnoyarsk region. 

Alongside them stood doors that stood for people targeted by the pruges. The House of the Construction Bureau was built in 1928 for members of the Bolshevo Labor Commune. It wasn’t long before they were all arrested. The building itself was illegally demolished in 2015.

There were doors from Moscow, too, the place where decisions were made and ordersfor arrests issued. Those orders hung on the museum walls and left no room for the comforting illusion that repression contained an element of chance. They showed that everything had been planned exactly so.

The museum also explained that there were camps in Moscow, too. Behind almost every fence guarding a construction site, there was free labor. A map of Moscow’s camps demonstrated that the city was the capital of the Gulag, 

There was also a door from the Execution House on Nikolskaya Street, bearing a quotation from the theatrical director Vsevlovod Meyerhold: “They beat me here, a sick 66-year-old man, laid me face down on the floor, beat my heels and back with a rubber strap.”

It seems absurd now to recall that there was once serious discussion about incorporating it as a branch of the Gulag History........

© The Moscow Times