The Museum That Got Re-Arrested: Perm-36’s Takeover and the Rewriting of the Gulag

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July 9, 2015: The Ribbon Cutting

On July 9, 2015, the Perm-36 museum opened a new exhibition. The regional culture minister, Igor Gladnev, gave a speech. “During times of great tribulations, during times of profound decisions for the country and the fate of the people, no one remained indifferent,” he said, according to RFE/RL’s reporting. “Today we are experiencing a deficit of faith, a deficit of unity.” He concluded: “So, glory to the heroes. Glory to those who fought, who laid down their lives in the name of our great victory and the preservation of our country.”

The exhibition he was opening was devoted not to the Stalin-era forced-labor system but to timber production at the camp and its contribution to the Soviet victory in World War II. The barracks, the watchtower, the fence—all of it was still there. The caption had changed.

This is the central mechanism of the Perm-36 case, and it is worth stating plainly: the most efficient way to neutralize a site of conscience is not to bulldoze it. It is to keep the buildings and rewrite the wall text. Physical authenticity, which once made the museum powerful, becomes the raw material for a different story. The camp remains. The charge to remember does not.

The Baseline: What Perm-36 Was

Perm-36, in the forests about 75 kilometers from the city of Perm, served as a labor camp for criminals and political prisoners throughout most of the Soviet period, until 1988. In 1992, a group of academics and activists created the Museum of Political Repressions there. For two decades it was run by an NGO, the Perm-36 Memorial Center of Political Repression, and it became a founding member of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. Its annual Pilorama festival brought filmmakers, human rights activists, and former prisoners to the site. The National Security Archive later published photographs of Memorial chairman Arseny Roginsky walking visitors through the barracks during the last Pilorama festival in 2012, before the authorities shut the site down.

That is the baseline. Not a neutral heritage site, but an institution with a stated mission: to document and interpret political repression. The distinction matters because the takeover did not eliminate the museum. It changed what the museum was for.

The Takeover: 2014–2015

In 2014, with political changes in Russia and a change of governor in the Perm region, Memorial Centre Perm-36 was removed from the museum. The state-owned buildings and facilities of the former camp were transferred to establish a state institution. The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, in its institutional account of the case, states that this “drastically changed the mission of the former site.” No longer a museum devoted to the repressive forced-labor practices of the Stalin era, it became one that presents the gulag as a vital component of the Soviet victory in World War II.

RFE/RL reported in July 2015 that local officials under Governor Viktor Basargin had taken over the museum after the Perm-36 group was labeled a “foreign agent” by the government. The designation was a proximate trigger. The gubernatorial turnover was the political condition. The result was a transfer of the interpretive layer—exhibitions, archives, programming—from the founders to a state institution with a different brief.

The new head of exhibitions, Yelena Mamayeva, described the approach shortly after her appointment. The museum, she said, was trying to talk more about the architectural complex of the camp and not to get involved in assessing specific people who served sentences there, or assessing Stalin, because that was “not quite politically correct.” A tour guide at the revamped exhibition emphasized that the prisoners were criminals and “dissidents who were involved in anti-Soviet activity.” One visitor told RFE/RL that “all the emphasis” was on criminals and “people who carried out sabotage during the war.”

Viktor Shmyrov, a local historian who founded the original museum, was not invited to the opening. He told RFE/RL that historians like Mikhail Suslov, who spoke at the event, were “justifying the gulag.” “And this is monstrous,” he said. “This can go very far.”

What “Balance” Does

The vocabulary of balance and objectivity is not incidental here. It is the curatorial technology of forgetting. When the exhibition head says the museum will not assess “specific people” or Stalin because that is “not quite politically correct,” the claim to neutrality is itself a political choice about which harms are speakable and which are not. A museum that declines to judge the Gulag is not above politics. It has made a political judgment: that the repressive apparatus is not the story.

Consider what the new framing gains and loses. It gains the timber, the labor, the wartime contribution—a story in which the camp is a productive institution and the prisoners are workers. It loses the prisoners’ testimony, the mortality figures, the arbitrary rules designed for selective enforcement, the solitary confinement, the letters smuggled out in bodies. The architecture remains. The evidence of what the architecture was for recedes.

This is not a matter of emphasis. It is a matter of what a site of conscience is for. A preserved camp can host either a charge to remember or an alibi for forgetting. The difference is made in wall text, tour scripts, and which experts are invited to the opening.

The Founders’ Liquidation: March 2015

In March 2015, Shmyrov announced the liquidation of his organization. RFE/RL described it as effectively conceding defeat in a drawn-out battle to stay involved in the museum’s management. That act is not a footnote. It is the tell.

When the state owns the buildings and controls the label, the NGO’s remaining assets are its archive and its name. Even those can be administratively stripped. The founders’ decision to liquidate was a strategic retreat, not a failure of nerve. It recognized that the interpretive layer had already been transferred, and that the legal form of the organization could no longer protect the work.

The Sequence: Perm-36 and Memorial

The Perm-36 takeover should be read alongside the later liquidation of Memorial as a sequence, not an isolated event. First the local institution is detached from its founders and relabeled. Then the national memory organization is dissolved.

On March 3, 2022, the Russian Supreme Court turned down Memorial’s appeal against “liquidation” orders intended by the authorities in December 2021 to put the society out of business, after more than 30 years documenting the victims and the previously secret history of Soviet repression. The National Security Archive published the briefing book that day, including Memorial director Elena Zhemkova’s statement: “Our organization is destroyed but our work continues, to find the families of the victims, to keep the memory of the political repressions, to contribute to the rehabilitation of the wronged, and this work is not going to disappear.”

Each step in this sequence is legal-administrative rather than violent. That is precisely what makes the pattern portable. No one needs to arrest a museum. A foreign-agent designation, a gubernatorial change, a property transfer, a liquidation order—these are the instruments. The buildings stay standing. The mission changes.

What to Ask About Any Heritage Site

For readers outside Russia, the useful lesson is procedural. Ask who controls the interpretive layer of a heritage site, not just who owns the fabric. Ownership of the buildings is necessary but not sufficient. The question that determines whether a site remembers or consoles is who writes the exhibition text, who trains the guides, which historians are invited to the opening, and what the institution says it will not assess.

The Perm-36 case offers a checklist:

  • Who founded the institution, and who runs it now?
  • What was the stated mission at founding, and what is the stated mission today?
  • Which primary documents—prisoner testimony, camp records, mortality data—are displayed, and which are absent?
  • What language does the institution use to describe its own neutrality or balance?
  • Who was not invited to the opening?

These are not abstract questions. They are the difference between a museum that preserves a charge and one that preserves a building while draining the charge out of it.

FAQ

Was Perm-36 literally “re-arrested”?

No. The sources describe a takeover, a mission change, and the liquidation of the founding NGO. There is no record in the retrieved material of the museum being arrested in any legal sense. The phrase is a figure for the administrative neutralization of an institution, not a description of a criminal proceeding against it.

Did the new exhibition remove all references to Stalin?

The retrieved RFE/RL report describes a new emphasis on timber production and wartime victory, and it notes a separate exhibit titled “Gulag: History, Work, Life” that included a portrait of Stalin suspended from the ceiling. Claims of total erasure are not supported by the retrieved text. The shift is one of framing and emphasis, not necessarily of complete removal.

Who ordered the takeover?

The retrieved sources attribute it to local officials under Governor Viktor Basargin and to broader political changes in Russia, including the “foreign agent” designation of the Perm-36 group. They do not document a chain of command to Vladimir Putin or a named Kremlin official. The precise causal weight of the foreign-agent label versus the gubernatorial turnover is not established by the retrieved material.

What happened to the original collection and archives?

The retrieved sources do not provide a verifiable inventory of what happened to the original collection after the takeover. The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience states that it continues to work with the original founders, assisting them in enhancing and expanding their work, which is currently focused on developing a website documenting gulags and sites of detention. A full accounting of the collection’s disposition would require primary documents from the Perm Krai administration or the successor institution.

Sources