The Research and Information Centre “Memorial” has been working on the project “The Virtual Museum of the Gulag” since 2004.
The principal aims of the project:
1. The preservation of memory, museum initiatives and unique testimonies. The introduction of our accumulated experience and knowledge into the public sphere.
2. To collate resource the uncoordinated initiatives regarding the preservation of memory and testimonies about the Soviet past into a single information. To overcome the regional or confessional divisions in our consciousness of the Terror and the Gulag.
3. To provide information and advice for provincial museums.
4. The creation of a public and generally accessible national museum.
5. Public discussion of the past and the role of such a social and historical legacy.
6. The instruction and education of the younger generation.
The current stage of the project:
A list of the “Museums of the Gulag” – state, departmental, school, public and private museums- and museum initiatives that are working on exhibitions or collections on the theme of political repression in the Soviet Union, on the history of the Gulag and the history of resistance movements, has been compiled.
As of Autumn 2005 this list comprises 290 such museum sites in the Russian territory and the countries of the former Soviet Union. Geographical expansion of the project in the museums of eastern Europe is foreseen.
A brief description of the museums:
- a significant proportion of the museums work outside the museum community; their collections are neither studied nor catalogued, as the employees have no qualifications and cannot display or inventory the exhibits.
- with rare exceptions there is no demand for the exhibitions and collections, either among the general public or among the narrow local community. This occurs for the following reasons: the primativeness of the display and a lack of material for the creation of an exhibition (i.e. it is not interesting); a thinly populated region (there is nobody to visit the collection); a general lack of interest in the subject.
- In its expedition seasons in 2004 and 2005, the research and information centre “Memorial” has visited 80 museums, set up contacts with the employees, collected visual material and inventoried the collections. In the archive of the Museum of the Gulag there are more than 10 thousand images.
- 4 museum seminars have taken place (in Syktyvkar, St Petersburg, Ukhta and Perm), at which colleagues from 35 provincial museums were present.
All of the museums expressed interest in taking part in the “Virtual Museum of the Gulag”. They formulated the following list of their problems and wishes:
- The threat of losing the collections, and the problems of completing the collection;
- existence outside familiar surroundings;
- the impossibility of creating displays and cataloguing collections with one’s own means;
- the necessity for constant practical help in such creation of displays and in cataloguing exhibits (working out special practical solutions);
- the necessity for a stock of general exhibits for use in the creation of their exhibitions
Presentations of and discussions forums about the first issue of the compact disc “The Virtual Museum of the Gulag” were carried out in Saint Petersburg, Syktyvkar, Moscow, Perm, Ukhta, Pechor and also in Berlin, Tübingen and Cologne. The participants were museum employees, academics, those who have contributed their stories , teachers and young people- school pupils, university students, and the general public.
Discussion and the forums carried out indicated interest in the project among:
- the museum community (in the project as a general information resource and to popularise private collections);
- scholars and historians, ethnographers, those who study the culture sociologists and others (in the project as a way of introducing unique collections and testimonies into the research field, for the purposes of research into the conditions of memory)
- teachers (in using the information in lecture courses and lessons);
- the general public (in the project as a way of attracting wider interest into the conditions of remembrance of totalitarianism and the possibility of its influence on the social consciousness in the realms of understanding the catastrophic Soviet past)
