Russia shuts Moscow's famed gulag museum

Russian authorities ordered the closure from Thursday of Moscow's award-winning Gulag History Museum, dedicated to the victims of Soviet-era repression.

The closure was officially put down to alleged violations of fire safety regulations, but comes amid an intense campaign being waged by the Kremlin against independent civil society and those who question the state's interpretation of history.

"The decision to temporarily suspend the activities of the State Gulag Museum was taken for safety reasons," the Moscow city culture department told AFP on Thursday.

The museum removed content from its website, replacing it with an announcement of the "temporary" closure.

They declined to comment further when contacted by AFP on Thursday.

Established in 2001, the central Moscow museum brings together official state documents with family photographs and objects from gulag victims.

Moscow authorities said 46,000 people visited in the first nine months of the year.

The gulag was a vast network of prison labour camps set up in the Soviet Union.

Millions of alleged traitors and enemies of the state were sent there, many to their deaths, in what historians recognise as a period of massive political repression.

The Council of Europe awarded the site its Museum Prize in 2021, saying it worked to "expose history and activate memory, with the goal of strengthening the resilience of civil society and its resistance to political repression and violation of human rights today and in the future."

Outside the museum on Thursday, worker Mikhail, who declined to give his last name, lamented its possible closure.

"It's a strong museum, very impressive. It's disappointing that this happened. It's a loss, a great loss if, God forbid, it's permanent," he told AFP.

"We need people to see it, to understand, to know that it must not be repeated."

But Moscovite Yulia, a musician in her 50s who also declined to give her last name, welcomed the closure.

"I'm against such establishments, I'm not sad," she told AFP while walking her dog in a nearby park.

"I'm a Stalinist... people die in every era, right now as well. We can't make monuments for every era."

Through his 24 years in power, President Vladimir Putin has sought to revise Russia's historical narrative and its relationship with the Soviet Union.

While occasionally condemning the vast repression under Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, Putin more often hails him as a great wartime leader.

School textbooks pay little attention to the millions of victims of the Great Terror, seen as inconvenient in the promotion of the Soviet Union as a great power that defeated Nazi Germany.

Authorities have increasingly targeted individuals and groups who push back against this approach -- a campaign that has stepped up amid the Ukraine offensive.

In 2021, authorities ordered the liquidation of Memorial, the Nobel Prize-winning NGO that records victims of both Soviet repression and allegations of human rights violations by the current regime.

Last month the Gulag History Museum staged a "Return of the Names" event -- when individuals read out the names of people killed during Soviet terror.