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Perm-36

Max Sher

Published on 09/03/15

© Max Sher

RUSSIA’S ONLY GULAG MUSEUM WILL NOW HONOR THE AUTHORITIES, NOT VICTIMS OF THE GULAG ANYMORE

High-security labor camp VS-389/36 that later became known as Perm-36 was cre­ated in 1946 and was ini­tially designed for minor offend­ers. In 1953 it was con­ver­ted into a prison camp for con­victed police­men and secur­ity offi­cials and was used as such until 1972 when it became a spe­cial ‘cor­rec­tional’ facil­ity for polit­ical prisoners.

Among those who served their terms in Perm-36 were Soviet dis­sid­ents Vladi­mir Bukovsky, Sergei Kova­lev, Yuri Orlov, future Israeli politi­cian Nathan Shar­ansky, as well as many Ukrain­ian, Esto­nian, Lithuanian, Latvian and other polit­ical pris­on­ers.
Eight of them, includ­ing Ukrain­ian poet Vasil Stus, died here after hun­ger strikes. The facil­ity was closed in 1988 by the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

In the 1990s an NGO called Perm-36 was cre­ated. It opened a museum in 1996 to pre­serve the only Soviet gulag facil­ity.
Museum has organ­ized vari­ous human rights events and did a sig­ni­fic­ant research that made it pos­sible to doc­u­ment and show­case the his­trory of Gulag.

In 2014 as part of a broader crack­down by the Rus­sian gov­ern­ment on civil soci­ety and human rights, the museum was stripped of gov­ern­ment fund­ing. In March 2015 Perm-36 stated it was finally clos­ing. Regional author­it­ies announced that now they intend to cre­ate a new museum that would foucus on his­tory of the local depart­ment of cor­rec­tions and evol­u­tion of prison tech­no­lo­gies, without any ref­er­ence to polit­ical repres­sions whatsoever.

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