Moscow’s Gulag museum forced Russians to confront their own history. The Kremlin has decided that era is over. A new ‘Museum of Memory’ has one villain: the Nazis.
Russia is turning one of its last major spaces for confronting Soviet-era repression into a showcase for state-sanctioned patriotism. The Gulag History Museum in Moscow — long a rare institutional refuge for the memory of Stalin’s victims — is becoming a “Museum of Memory” dedicated to what the Kremlin calls the “genocide of the Soviet people” at the hands of Nazi Germany. The transformation encapsulates a broader Kremlin project: not the suppression of historical memory, but its replacement with a competing narrative that serves the present war in Ukraine.
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The new entity will take over the building where the Gulag History Museum operated until it was forced to suspend operations in November 2024, officially over fire-safety violations. Natalya Kalashnikova, a veteran of both Russia’s energy sector and its war in Ukraine, will lead the new museum. The old institution’s collections will be consigned to storage. The new genocide exhibition will reportedly draw on archives from the ”No Statute of Limitations” project, which has already reached Russian classrooms, where schools have organized students into staged commemorations, sometimes making them kneel for the Nazis’ victims.
The concept of “genocide of the Soviet people” has no grounding in Soviet-era historiography or established international law. President Putin introduced the terminology into Russian public discourse in July 2020, when he declared that Nazi crimes against Soviet citizens “have no statute of limitations” and should be recognized as genocide both at home and globally. Russian courts moved quickly: By October 2020, a court had recognized wartime mass killings as genocide for the first time, and in 2022, the Siege of Leningrad received the same designation. A law ”On Perpetuating the Memory of Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People” followed in April 2025. State Duma deputies have since proposed criminal penalties for denying that this genocide occurred.
Since April 2025, Natalya Kalashnikova has run the Smolensk Fortress museum, where she has regularly welcomed veterans of the war in Ukraine. She has made nearly monthly trips to the front — in what capacity, her institution has not said — and holds medals for participation in the ”special military operation” and for contributions to Russia’s defense.
In contrast to Kalashnikova’s militant patriotism, her eldest son, now 31, left Russia for Austria just a week before the full-scale invasion began and has not returned. Dmitry Kalashnikov, an alumnus of both the Moscow Conservatory and London’s Royal College of Music, continues to perform abroad; in May 2022, he received one of the Royal College’s top honors from then-Prince Charles.
Before moving into cultural administration, Kalashnikova worked in Russia’s energy sector, overseeing the creation of Krymenergo, the utility established after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. She met the Gulag museum’s existing staff for the first time on February 20, 2026, the same day her appointment was announced.
The institution she is inheriting operated under fundamentally different principles. Founded in 2001, the Gulag History Museum survived until November 2024 as Russia’s only major center preserving the memory of Soviet political repression, serving as a counterweight to the historical amnesia promoted by the Kremlin. The museum’s previous director, Roman Romanov — who held the post from 2012 until he was dismissed in early 2025 — was reportedly forced out after refusing to remove sections about Soviet state violence from an exhibition on Moscow’s history. Putin subsequently removed him from the Presidential Human Rights Council.
One museum employee told the news website Gazeta.ru that the staff is at a loss: “Everyone is confused, trying to decide whether to stay or go. The exhibition will be completely redone, everything will be new. The Gulag museum’s collection will stay in storage — it will just lie there.”
Kalashnikova described the changes as a “reorganization” and said the collection cannot legally be destroyed, as all items are registered state property. She added, with an air of circular logic, that before anyone discusses an opening date, the building’s safety would need to be assessed. “We have to check out the fire situation first — you remember those issues,” she told her new colleagues.