[CivilSoc] Gulag Museum To Open in Moscow in Late 2002

[Center for Civil Society International]

This item is from Johnson's Russia List
#5433
9 September 2001
davidjohnson@erols.com
#10
Financial Times (UK)
8 September 2001
The long shadow of the Gulag: A planned museum devoted to the
Stalinist labour camps is opening old wounds
By ANDREW JACK
Nearly 50 years after Stalin's death brought the worst of the Soviet
Union's labour camp system to an end, plans to open a national museum
dedicated to the darkest period of 20th-century Russian history are
reopening painful wounds.
The Gulag Museum, containing archives and artefacts highlighting the
plight of the millions who suffered and died under communist
totalitarianism, is due to open next autumn in the centre of Moscow.
"We need not just a monument but a living exhibition so younger
generations can see history with their own eyes and attempt to create
a different society without nihilism or cynicism," says Anton
Antonov-Ovseyenko, the 81-year-old amateur historian and instigator
of the project, who himself spent 13 years in labour camps.
But the proposal has attracted controversy in a country still
struggling to come to terms with its past. Some question its
desirability. Others ask why no such institution has been created
before - the attempted putsch that triggered the collapse of the
Soviet Union happened 10 years ago.
"The absence of a national Gulag museum is inevitable, because
unfortunately contemporary Russian society does not view its own
history in the way that the Germans did after the second world war,"
says Yuri Pivovarov, director of the Institute of Social Science
Research at the Russian Academy of Sciences. "People do not equate
the ethical and moral horrors and shame of Nazism with those of
communism."
He argues that a first wave of changing postwar attitudes in Germany
was imposed by Allied forces and supported by the Catholic Church and
by rapid economic growth. In Russia, by contrast, the Orthodox Church
was a marginalised and compromised force. The collapse of communism
in the 1990s, which brought a sharp deterioration in living standards
for most people, replaced disillusionment with the past with a
romanticised memory of its better aspects.
"The number of Russians who think the repression was good is very
small but people also remember positive things: the winning of the
war and the battle for space exploration," says Igor Klyamkin, an
academic. "Most older people take Stalinism into account and remember
it for better or for worse but just prefer not to think about it."
Such ambivalence can be found in even greater measure among Russia's
political elite. "The majority of so-called democrats prefer not to
change anything because, in their sub-conscious, they recognise that
they were all active in one way or another in the old regime," says
Andrei Zubov, a cultural historian.
President Vladimir Putin, a career KGB officer, has, for example,
reinstated an only slightly modified Stalin-era national anthem. He
has continued to award Red Star military medals and allowed the use
of "comrade" as a form of address. These actions, condemned by
intellectuals, appear to reflect Mr Putin's desire to unite the
country and avoid inflaming the deep scars that Russian society still
bears.
Mr Antonov-Ovseyenko's Gulag Museum represents an attempt to fill the
void created by the absence of political leadership and the
ambivalence of ordinary people, as well as to lessen the dissent
among other cash-strapped groups concerned with the evils of the
communist past.
Memorial, the human rights organisation founded by the scientist
Andrei Sakharov, has amassed a substantial archive and has a modest
exhibition space in its cramped Moscow headquarters. , But Arseny
Roginsky, its director, stresses that any new museum should not draw
too sharp a distinction between the "evil past and the good present",
pointing out that many Soviet archives have been inaccessible to
researchers over the past few years; that human rights abuses
continue today; and that many people deported under Stalin are still
unable to return home.
Yuri Samodurov, head of Moscow's Sakharov Centre, which also has a
small permanent exhibit on the repression, also fears that Mr
Antonov-Ovseyenko's project risks being hijacked by vested interests,
including the City of Moscow, which has allocated a building and
funds to the museum.
Certainly, the budget of Rbs60m (Dollars 2m) and timetable of one
year to the opening appear extremely optimistic, while Mr
Antonov-Ovseyenko's determination to run the museum himself in spite
of his frailty may pose difficulties in the future.
In spite of the tensions, Andrei Zubov argues that--in the same way
that inter-generational clashes in Germany in the 1960s helped the
country to confront its Nazi past--"this new generation doesn't
accept the arguments of fathers and grandfathers. I hope that in 10
or 15 years, Russian society will be able to understand this terrible
communist regime in all its scale."