A reshuffling at the helm of the Gulag Museum in Moscow has revealed how the Kremlin is creating a new ideologically loyal cadre of cultural managers, some of whom are even receiving military training as part of their advancement.
In November 2024, officials announced the temporary shutdown of the Gulag Museum over purported fire safety violations. This was followed a couple of months later by the announcement that its director, Roman Romanov, had been dismissed. Anna Trapkova, the director of the Museum of Moscow, was named as his replacement and will run both museums.
A case of censorship is believed to be behind the ousting. According to a Telegram social media post by Ksenia Basilashvili, an arts journalist in Russia, wall texts written by Gulag Museum staff detailing repressive acts under the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had been removed from an exhibition at the Museum of Moscow.
Basilashvili’s post shows photos of the inscriptions above objects from the House on the Embankment, an early Soviet home for elites, many of whom were arrested and killed in Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s, followed by an image of bare walls. The items are now part of a display on the 1930s, Basilashvili wrote, with their historical context removed: “There is no section on repression.” Meduza, an independent Russian news site based in Latvia, reported on 15 January that the Gulag Museum was closed after Romanov refused to remove the texts himself.
Crackdown on free speech
Novaya Gazeta Europe, an independent Latvia-based Russian publication that is banned in Russia, reported that a Russian state policy document on the memorialisation of victims of political repression, on which the work of the Gulag Museum had been based, was so drastically altered in 2024 that the museum’s original mission was negated. According to the report, the updated policy, among numerous edits, removes mention of millions of people being imprisoned in Gulag prison camps, deported and stripped of their property. Denunciations of Ukrainian and Baltic Nazi collaborators were also added.
The changes were apparently made as the Russian government under President Vladimir Putin, who had once expressed support for victims of repression, continues to crack down on free expression after eliminating political opposition through draconian laws, exile and imprisonment. As repression has intensified under his rule, the window for recognising the sins of the past appears to be closing.
In another major personnel change, Elizaveta Likhacheva was removed as the director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in January. Regarded as loyal to the regime, she had defended the Gulag Museum against closure. She was replaced by Olga Galaktionova, the director of the State Museum and Exhibition Centre, Rosizo, who was known for staging blockbuster exhibitions that glorified Soviet art.
Anatoly Golubovsky, a sociologist and museums expert, wrote on Facebook: “Could the authorities expect the Roman Romanov-led team to bring the Gulag History Museum’s concept and exhibition in line with all these deletions? Of course not.”
Combat training for cultural leaders
As we went to press, Romanov, who is also the director of the Memory Foundation, which supports projects across Russia related to the memorialisation of victims of repression, was still listed as a member of Putin’s Council for Civil Society and Human Rights. The chairman of the council, the journalist Valery Fadeev, told the group on 22 January that the Gulag Museum would soon reopen and the council might hold a meeting there.
Trapkova and several of Russia’s other newly appointed museum directors, including Nikita Anikin of the Rostov Kremlin State Museum-Reserve, are graduates of the Higher School of Management in the Sphere of Culture. Russia’s culture minister, Olga Lyubimova, said on its website that the purpose of the school is to train senior management of cultural institutions to be “real leaders who will not only manage but also convey the right meanings and values”.
Roman Romanov had been director of the Gulag Museum since 2012
Photo: Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images
In 2022, when Putin ordered a partial mobilisation of troops to fight in Ukraine, a section of the Museum of Moscow under Trapkova was turned into a military recruitment centre. And last autumn, a group of the school’s students underwent combat training in the Nizhny Novgorod region with veterans of Russia’s war against Ukraine, which is still officially referred to as the SVO, or “special military operation.” Nizhny Novgorod, which has become a cultural showcase, is also a military-industrial centre. The training was held at Stal (Steel), a school founded by Zakhar Prilepin, a best-selling novelist who boasted of leading a pro-Russian paramilitary group in eastern Ukraine. After the fire hazard claims were made against the Gulag Museum in November, he proclaimed it was a “museum of stupid anti-Soviet propaganda” and “it’s good that it’s going away”.
In a press release, the governor of Nizhny Novgorod region, Gleb Nikitin, said that writers, directors and composers had been inspired by their personal experiences during the Second World War and were “united with their homeland during its most difficult time”. Cultural workers today, he added, also require “personal immersion in the topic”.
