The Gulag History Museum in Moscow has been permanently closed. I wrote about my 2016 visit to the museum dedicated to detailing the brutalities experienced by 15 million to 18 million Soviet citizens imprisoned and 1.5 million murdered by the communist regime in the USSR's vast system of forced labor camps. Only after dictator Josef Stalin's death in 1953 were the gulag system's 300 prisons and 1,700 prison colonies closed. The Gulag History Museum opened in 2015 as "a center for studying, comprehending, and openly discussing the history of mass repression in the USSR." No longer.
The museum will be replaced by one focusing on Nazi war crimes and the "genocide of the Soviet people." And doubtlessly, the people living in the USSR suffered immensely from Nazi atrocities during World War II. The University of Hawaii's democide (Death by Government) database estimates that the Nazi invasion killed more than 12 million Soviet citizens during that war. Those sacrifices and deaths should certainly be memorialized.
