Museum ‘Memory of Kolyma’

The private museum ‘Pamyat Kolymy’ opened on 30 October 1994 in a two-room flat, which Ivan Panikarov, founder and director, had bought at his own expense. On 18 May 2005 the Museum will move into new premises, provided free of charge by the director of the local motor-transport depot, with the approval of the local authorities.

Most exhibits are part of I. Panikarov’s private collection, which he started in 1989. At present, the collection contains over 1000 pieces. Among them are working tools and items of everyday life (boots with soles made out of conveyor belts and soled with self-made nails, pea-jackets, working clothes, mittens); equipment of the guards (handcuffs, a rifle, a bayonet, door locks etc.); over 3000 photos of ex-prisoners, several hundred present-day photos showing the remains of the former camps; a selection of various newspapers, including camp-newspapers; over 5000 original official documents concerning the camps’ activities in Kolyma; court cases from the 1940s; maps published by the Dalstroi building-trust during the 1940s and 1950s; a collection of paintings and drawings by camp artists; items of everyday Soviet life.

The Museum is divided into several thematic areas: ‘The Echo of the Gulag’, ‘The History of the Settlements in Central Kolyma’, ‘Veterans of the North’ and others. It also organises exhibitions on local history in several regional arts centres, clubs and libraries.

The Museum keeps a specialist library on the history of political repression and the Gulag, holding about 1000 volumes, including over 200 memoirs of ex-prisoners. Researchers are compiling information on former prisoners of the Kolyma Camps; so far, the fates of more than 2000 people have been established. The organisation ‘Poisk nezakonno repressirovannykh’ (Search for Victims of Illegal Repression), founded by I. Panikarov, lends assistance to relatives of former prisoners in their search for traces of their family members’ lives. Expeditions to the sites of former camps and production-sites are used to complement the Museum’s collection. Local secondary school pupils and ‘Memorial’ members from other regions regularly participate in these excursions. Among the activities of the Museum is the publication of a book series called ‘Arkhivy pamyati’ (Archives of Remembrance; these books feature local history and include memoirs of ex-prisoners) and a monthly newsletter on local history called ‘Chudnaya planeta (Wonderful Planet)’.