Taimyr Okrug Museum of Local Lore and History

The Museum’s permanent exhibition dedicates two showcases and the installation ‘Nordvik’ to the Gulag. In addition it displays material from the exhibition ‘Candle of Memory’, which opened on 30 October 2000, such as documents, photographs and items of everyday life from the collection. The Museum will move into new premises in 2005, where the exhibition ‘Civilisation’ will put the history of camps, exile and special settlements in Taimyr into the context of the region’s history as a whole.

The Museum’s collection contains many exhibits on the history of the Gulag, such as items of everyday camp life, private photographs, personal belongings and documents of special settlers. These items have been assigned to the general collection without being marked as a separate thematic unit. Instead they are mostly found among the biographical material on outstanding workers and cultural figures of Taimyr who happened to be either prisoners of Norilsk Camp or special settlers, or among material and documents related to the camp’s production and construction work.

The concerted search for material on the topic of repression began in 1989. Of special interest are personal belongings of German special settlers, families that were deported from the Volga region: Distaffs, books, prayer-books, table-clothes, handkerchiefs with national symbols and family photographs. Other objects considered important are the items found on the site of the former camp ‘Nordvik’ (northern part of the peninsula Taimyr) by an expedition conducted by the ‘Museum on the History of the Settling and Development of the Norilsk Industry District (NPR)’ in 1991.