From: Stephen F Cohen <sfc1@nyu.edu>
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009
Subject: Re Orlando Figes/JRL #19 (May 15) [re: Gulag museums]
I want to correct a small but significant mistake in Orlando Figes's article that appeared in JRL, #19 (May 15). Figes, one of out leading authorities on the history of the Stalinist terror, asserts that Perm-36, in the Urals, is the only "substantial museum of the Gulag" in Russia. This is a lamentable oversight, and not only on the part of Figes.
In 2004, Anton Antonov-Ovseenko founded and opened the State Museum of the History of the Gulag (Gosudarstvenyi muzei istorii GULAGa) in the very center of Moscow. Antonov-Ovseenko is himself a survivor of Stalin's prisons and camps, where both his father and mother perished, and for nearly forty years he has been a defiantly courageous historian of the despot's terror. (About his I can testify personally because we have been close friends for more than thirty years.)
The museum may not be as "substantial" as Figes (or Anton) might wish, butt considering the political and financial circumstances in Russia in recent years, it is a remarkable achievement by a man now in hi ninetieth year. It is also a powerfully evocative exhibition of Stalin's terror, from arrest to death, recreating the history of the Gulag through photographs, paintings, relics from the camps, prose and poetry, and, in the basement, a chilling replica of a barrack cell and NKVD "interrogation" room.
How little this museum seems to be known even to Western specialists may reflect how exclusively many of them have relied on the Memorial Society. I too am a great admirer of Memorial, but there are other Russian organizations and representatives of Stalin's victims. Anton was one of them long before Memorial was founded in the late 1980s.
Whatever the explanation, all of us should support and honor the museum created by Anton Antonov-Ovseenko by visiting it when we are in Mosow. It is located at Petrovka Street, No. 16, very close to a building that houses Stalin-era archives and surrounded by upscale shops catering to "New Russians." The museum is open daily, except Sunday and Monday, from 11am to 4pm.