The permanent exhibition ‘Polar Vorkuta. A Town’s History’, opened in 1989, was the first exhibition to engage with the Gulag past of Vorkuta by displaying copies of documents and photographs from the republic’s archives, including the archives of the State Security Service. The study of how the town came into being during the Gulag period has become a priority for the Museum.
The Museum also organises temporary exhibitions on the Gulag topic, such as ‘History of a Family’ and others. Some of these exhibitions, for example ‘Life after death’ (2000), telling the story of how after their release prisoners started to engage in artistic and scientific activities, became part of the permanent exhibition.
The collection on the history of the Vorkuta Camp presently contains 1700 items, primarily documents and photographs. The museum also has a collection of prisoners’ personal belongings and ‘camp archaeology’, that is, objects that were discovered on the territory of former camps, for example chessmen made of dough. The Museum owns a large number of artworks (ca. 700 pieces) made by convicts during their time in the camp and also after their release (drawings, paintings, self-made postcards). There is also the unique collection of posters and programmes of the Vorkuta Music and Drama Theatre, the actors of which were prisoners, and a file of the newspaper ‘Sapolyarnaya Kochegarka’ (Polar Stokehold).
Exhibits from the Museum’s collection of items of everyday life in camp were shown at international exhibitions in Leipzig (1999) and Bonn (2004). The Museum participates in the Russian-German exhibition project ‘Spuren. Germans and Russians in History’.
The Museum corresponds with former inmates and, if relatives and friends of former prisoners appeal, helps them find information about the fate of their loved ones. The Museum is also a venue for excursions, lectures and seminars, such as ‘People of the Vorkuta Camp’,’ Love and Children behind Barbed Wire’, ‘Vorkuta Camp Theatre’. The Museum is involved in the organisation of the annual Remembrance Days on 30 October and 1 August, which is the date when striking prisoners were executed at Yur-Shor. For the town’s website the Museum put together the section ‘People and Fates’.
