The Museum of the school’s history club ‘Makarikha’ opened on 10 October 2002, founded on the initiative of I. A. Dubrovina, head of the History and Human Rights Organisation of Kotlas, ‘Sovest’ (‘Conscience’), and M. V. Klapiyuk, a history teacher.
The Museum is located in a separate room of about 50m 2 floor space. The exhibition stands and displays were made by pupils during handicrafts at school. The permanent exhibition consists of six interchangeable thematic exhibits: ‘The village Uste’ (on the fate of repressed inhabitants of nearby villages and farmers who were deported to Uste during the period of collectivisation); ‘Chapel’ (on 20th century history, seen through the history of chapel buildings in the Makarikha district that were successively used as church, kindergarten, club, hostel for settlers or residential house); ‘Cabins of Makarikha’ (on the fate of special-settlers/farmers in the 1920s and 1930s); ‘Smolnikovo’ (on the construction of the Kotlas-Vorkuta railway line); ‘People of Makarikha’ (on the fate of special settlers); Gulag in the North. The Museum is preparing the exhibition ‘German Community in Kotlas Town’, dealing with the fate of exiled Russian Germans from the 1930s to the 1950s.
The members of the Club have been collecting material and exhibits since 2000; today the collection contains more than 300 exhibits, among them more than 100 original items, documents and photographs and also more than 200 copies of documents and photographs on the history of the Gulag and of political repression in the Kotlas district.
Students of the upper grades carry out research projects, such as conducting expeditions and assembling an archive of oral history material. In the Club there is also a group organising historical theatre, and a group in charge of the memorial cemetery ‘Makarikha’.
