© 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.