The history of the Memorial Museum Perm–36: the experience of historiographical comprehension and museumification

Abstract

The article studies the history of a small timber-harvesting colony that was created in the times of the GULAG labor camps, outlived the period of being a political colony, and was transformed into a museum, the Museum of the History of Political Repression Perm–36, in the 1990s. Based on the analysis of publications of the 1990s–2000s, an attempt was made to recreate the history of comprehension of the era of political repression using the example of a certain museum. From the active study of the topic in the early 1990s and establishment of a public museum with support from the Perm Oblast administration, Perm–36 moved on to undergo severe criticism from the local and federal press, deprivation of financing and administrative support and, finally, rather rough dismissal of the museum administration and appointment of top managers from the Ministry of Culture. The public museum had a powerful creative and scientific potential that allowed it to develop, implement new forms of work, and attract the international museum and human rights community, but, unfortunately, the State Memorial Museum of the History of Political Repression Perm–36 has become an ordinary regional museum in fact. In the first years of being a state museum (2015–16), the administration of Perm-36 tried to revise the directions of work of the public museum. This was expressed in its attempts to justify the authorities and the cruel laws of the time when the colony existed and to find some incriminating evidence against its political prisoners. New exhibitions of the museum (e.g. “Broken by windfalls”) highlighted the state’s need for the prisoners’ work, in particular in harvesting timber needed for the reconstruction of war-ravaged cities, the successes in mechanization of camp production, and so on. The public outcry forced the leadership of the museum to adjust its course. Now, according to the development concept adopted in 2019, the activities of the reserve museum are aimed at preserving the memory of victims of political repression in order to prevent such tragedies in the future. The state museum Perm–36 continues to open new exhibitions and expositions that tell the story of the colony through the stories of people from the GULAG camps, dissidents, and human rights activists. However, the activities of the state memorial museum, which is deprived of public initiative and creative potential of the first directors, cannot yet rise to the level of international recognition and significance that its predecessor, the public museum, used to have.