Музей истории ГУЛАГа / GULAG History Museum

The museum was founded in 2001 by the famous historian, publicist and public figure A.V. Antonov-Ovseenko, who passed through the camps as the son of an "enemy of the people." In 2015, the Museum moved to a new building, increasing its area by 4 times.

One of the main tasks of the Museum is the preservation of historical memory, the motivation not only to comprehend the past, but also to realize the tasks of tomorrow.

The history of the Gulag - the system of corrective labor camps that became an instrument of state repression in the USSR in the 1930-1950s - has never before been presented in the museum space as a single integral phenomenon, therefore the Museum of the history of the Gulag has no analogues among Russian museums.

The Museum's collection includes an archive of documents, letters, and memoirs of former GULAG prisoners; a collection of personal belongings belonging to them and related to the history of their incarceration; a collection of works of art created by artists who have gone through the Gulag, and modern authors offering their own understanding of this topic.

Things, documents, photographs, and the “voices” of eyewitnesses at the Museum’s exhibition provide viewers with the opportunity to see the dramatic history of a large country through the prism of their personal stories. The breadth of the exhibition geography is underlined by the map of the USSR with the designations of camps, camp administrations and the number of prisoners detained here at different periods of history.