State Museum of the History of the Gulag: description, prices, reviews

The Museum of the History of the Gulag appeared in Moscow in 2001 near the Lubyanka metro station. It is located on Petrovka Street, 16, in the old house, where once there was the Raevsky Manor, and later, in the 90s, there was a beer restaurant. This building had nothing to do with the Stalinist repressive machine. Initially, the museum planned to open in the former NKVD firing house on Nikolskaya street, but the organizers did not like its close proximity to the Nautilus trade center and the Tretyakovsky passage.

History of the museum

The founder and the first head of the museum was AV Antonov-Ovseyenko, a famous historian and public figure. He was the son of a revolutionary who was shot during the mass Stalinist repression. Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, like other people, whose relatives were ranked among the enemies of the people, happened to personally go through the GULAG. The museum was created thanks to the Moscow organization of the repressed, who presented him with a large number of prisoners' belongings (among them there are those that belonged to V. Antonov-Ovseyenko himself).

Description of expositions

The yard, where the State Museum of the History of the Gulag is located, is covered with barbed wire, and behind it hang portraits of Mandelstam, Tukhachevsky, Bukharin, Meyerhold, Vavilov and other famous people who were not spared by the meat chopper of repression. Under the windows of the building is a clock tower made of wooden boards, designed to observe the territory of the camp. Entering the house, visitors enter the recreated cabinet of the investigator of the NKVD. Following him, you can go to the barracks for the convicts and the punishment cell. To make the room realistic, the rooms are complemented by wax figures of investigators and prisoners. The atmosphere of these premises makes it possible to feel how terrible the existence of people that became objectionable to the Soviet power was.

The Museum of the History of the Gulag consists not only of reconstructions of individual fragments of the camp. There is also an art and historical documentary exhibition halls. In the first there are preserved works of art of people who have passed through Stalin's camps. There are also works by modern artists and sculptors dedicated to the theme of the Gulag. The exhibits of the second hall are personal letters and memoirs of prisoners, as well as documents directly related to the system of state administration of forced labor camps.

Working hours

Annually, about 1 thousand visitors come to the Museum of the history of the Gulag, the overwhelming majority of which are tourists. The institution is open for guests from Tuesday to Sunday. The day off is Monday. The mode of operation of the museum is as follows: from Tuesday to Wednesday and from Friday to Sunday it is open from 11:00 to 19:00. On Thursday from 12:00 to 20:00. The ticket office always closes 1 hour earlier than the exhibition halls. On the last Friday of each month, the museum does not serve visitors due to a sanitary day. For group excursions should be pre-recorded.

Gulag Museum: prices, reviews

In order to get to the museum, visitors need to purchase entrance tickets. Their cost varies from 50 to 200 rubles. For children under 7 years old, orphans, orphans, orphans, students of universities of inpatient education, disabled I and II groups, participants in the Second World War, victims of repression and some other categories of citizens, admission is free. On the third Sunday of every month, the museum caters to all its guests for free. Visitors are allowed to use cameras and video cameras.

People who visited the museum, note that it is psychologically difficult to be in it. Everything in the exhibition halls speaks about the hard life of prisoners who were not spared by the communist government. Documentary materials, fragments of barrack and insulator conditions perfectly convey the atmosphere in which people were kept. The paintings and sculptures successfully complement the museum's atmosphere, allow us to delve even deeper into the problem of studying the history of the Gulag.

Virtual museum dedicated to the Gulag

On the Internet today there is a virtual museum of the Gulag. It was created by the St. Petersburg Scientific and Information Center "Memorial" in cooperation with CJSC "Alt-Soft". The site contains many photographic materials of the Stalin era, located in different museum collections throughout the country. Also in his database there are testimonies about the life of the Gulag, which can not be seen in exhibition halls. These include images of camp buildings, preserved, semi-preserved and long-disappeared graves of convicts, monuments and memorial plaques dedicated to the memory of the victims of totalitarianism. The site was founded with the goal of creating on the Russian open spaces a single national museum dedicated to the Gulag, which contains all the materials available for today about this terrible period of Russian history.

Other places of memory repressed in Lubyanka

It was not in vain in the capital of the Russian Federation that the Museum of the History of the Gulag was opened. Moscow was the main city of the USSR. It was here that the destinies of millions of people were achieved. Not only the museum keeps a memory of political repression. Not far from it there is a former KGB building, behind the gray walls of which decisions were made on punishment measures for citizens disliked by Soviet power. Here, on the Lubyanka, you can go to the Solovetsky stone and honor the memory of those who were victims of a totalitarian machine.