Museum of Ukhta Technical State University

The collection on the history of political repression and the Gulag in the Ukhta Region was assembled during the 1990s by A.I Galkiny, the director of the Ukhta/Pechora ‘Memorial’ group. In 2001 it was transferred to the Museum of Ukhta University. This first collection is the foundation of the present Gulag collection, which is still growing. It presently contains about 1000 single items, including items of everyday camp life, documents, maps, unpublished memoirs, and interviews with survivors. There is no permanent exhibition on the camps so far. The Museum has started a collection on the industry of the Ukhta Region and is planning to create an exhibition.

The travelling exhibition ‘Ukhta 1929-1956’ was organised in 2002 with support from ‘Memorial International’. About 30 posters display photographs and documents on the history of the Ukhta-Pechora camp. The exhibition toured local schools, the Oil and Mining College, the Vocational School No. 30 and the Yarega Village School. Viewers were also offered a series of accompanying lectures.

The opening of the permanent exhibition ‘Ukhta – from Camp Town to University Town’ is envisaged for 2007. The exhibition will show originals and copies of items of everyday camp life (tools, bars, doors), and scientific and personal documents, such as geological reports on oil and gas deposits, geological maps; camp diaries, letters.

The Museum of the Ukhta University has close ties with other local industrial museums (Museums of Oil and Mining College, the Mechanical Factory and the Oil Refinery) and also works with school children. For example, copies of the exhibition ‘We – the Legacy of the Ukhta-Pechora Camp’ (43 posters) were given to every school in town, together with a teacher’s manual called ‘The Camp History of the Komi Region 1929-1955 through the Fates and Memories of Contemporaries: an Aid for Students of the History of Repression’.