The Gulag History Museum will be replaced by a museum dedicated to the victims of the genocide of the Soviet people in hands of the Nazis

The first national Museum of Memory dedicated to the victims of the Soviet genocide will open in Moscow on the site of the Gulag History Museum, a source familiar with the government's decision told Interfax. The museum's website also announced the opening of a new cultural center, whose exhibits "will cover all stages of Nazi war crimes during the Great Patriotic War."

The Moscow mayor's office clarified that the opening will take place in 2026. The new museum will be headed by Natalia Kalashnikova, who has headed the Smolensk Fortress Museum since April 2025. Minister of Culture Olga Lyubimova previously announced that Kalashnikova had been awarded the medals "For Contribution to Strengthening the Defense of the Russian Federation" and "Participant in a Special Military Operation." Upon her appointment, Kalashnikova stated that one of the key goals of the new museum is "to instill in the modern generation a strong rejection of Nazism in all its manifestations." She noted that this is "especially important now, when there are almost no living witnesses to those terrible events left."

The Gulag Museum's exhibits will be completely replaced, a source told RBC. "They promise they'll be preserved, but they're also talking about removing them from the museum building," the source said. Last November, the Gulag History Museum announced it would temporarily suspend operations due to fire safety violations. It has been closed since then.

Pushkin Museum Director Elizaveta Likhacheva noted that the suspension occurred under a "strange pretext, to put it mildly," and that the decision was made by people who "don't understand what they're doing." She explained that some self-proclaimed patriots see discussions of Stalin's repressions as aiding the enemy, but this is not the case. Likhacheva pointed out that Stalin's repressions were condemned back in the USSR.

The Gulag History Museum was founded in 2001. It housed over 5,000 exhibits. Among them were a 1935 NKVD uniform cap, a door from the "execution house" on Nikolskaya Street in Moscow, prison cell doors, letters written by repressed prisoners to their relatives, their personal belongings and documents, and shoes worn by children while imprisoned with their arrested parents.