Gulag Museum to Reopen But Proof of Stalin Crimes Removed, Director Says

Have you been there?

Lemme answer instead of him- No, he hasn't been there. Nor have I. What about you? What is your point if you have any at all?

It is the only GULAG museum in original setting. Here are two links about the place and people in it -1 and 2. Here are few conclusions one can draw from them. The camp was for 1000 persons ("The population remained at about 1000 prisoners from the moment they were forced to build their own walls in 1945 until its closure in 1988.") . At best only 30%/300 persons were "political" and that was "the highest concentration of “dangerous” political voices in the Soviet Union." The camp had three very distinct periods and the prison population in the first two periods was totally on the opposite poles:

the camp had three distinct periods. The first was from 1946 to 1953 when it functioned as a labour camp for prisoners that had offended the Stalinist regime, sometimes for crimes as minor as being late to work three times. The second period was in the years of destalinisation, from 1954 to 1972. During this time the camp was home to Soviet law enforcement officers that had run afoul of the regime, often for overzealously sending people to camps in the first period — meaning the people that were responsible for imprisoning the population in the first period were inmates themselves in the second. For the final period the existing population was moved elsewhere and Perm-36 became home exclusively for political prisoners, the result of a new round of political repression that began in the 70s.

The problem is not about misrepresentation of the real conditions the inmates were kept in, the problem is about the ideological twist and misrepresentation of what most of them were (and we are talking about the first period of Perm-36, of course). Now putting a political clout as "independence fighters and dissidents" on murderers and Nazi collaborators ain't gonna fly in Russia and that's what most of them were. I guess the only thing that saved them from being lined up and shot is that there was no direct evidence that they themselves killed the people instead of ordering it. Whitewashing and being oblivious about Nazi crimes and trying to pass them as freedom of speech and democracy is a no go here.

/r/russia Thread Parent Link - themoscowtimes.com