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The Virtual Museum of the Gulag Project

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The Virtual Museum of the Gulag Project The Virtual Museum of the Gulag – An Attempt at Integrating Material Memory The paper I am going to present here is not exclusively my own research. And it is based more on practical work than strictly academic research. I am going to introduce a project that has many contributors: the Virtual Museum of the Gulag. In particular, I want to discuss the methodology used for creating exhibitions with “Gulag exhibits”. The Virtual Museum of the Gulag is an internet project of the Research and Information Centre “Memorial” in St Petersburg. It exists since 2004 and I’ve been involved in it from the very beginning. It is a large-scale, ambitious project that has so far yielded astonishing results with little to no funding. In 2009, “Memorial” finally secured two modest development grants. Since then the technical aspects of the Virtual Museum have developed rapidly and we are finally in a position to create the virtual exhibitions that will eventually distinguish the museum from the information resource on which it is founded. It is the methodology used for creating these exhibitions that I want to talk about today. But let me first introduce the project in a bit more detail. Introduction In contemporary Russia, there is no central, large-scale “Museum of the Gulag”. Neither are there coherent government programmes on memory and the museification of this part of the past. One reason for this is the paradoxical presence – or present-ness – of the Stalinist past, including the Gulag and the terror, in contemporary discourse. The raging debate about the correct interpretation of Stalinism regularly enters current affairs and is used by politicians and journalists alike in order to further their ideological agenda. Recent examples include the attack by Gleb Pavlovskii, an influential political scientist and adviser to the Presidential Administration, on the work of the “Memorial” society,1 the commotion caused by Aleksandr Filippov’s history textbook Istoriia Rossii 1945-2008, which emphasised the role of Stalin as an “efficient” manager who secured the Soviet victory in WWII, and the creation of a government commission that is to combat attempts at “falsifying” the representation of Russia in history. There have been signs recently that President Medvedev is preparing to adopt a new strategy, one that might assuage critics of the course hitherto pursued by his administration (and that of his predecessor Putin), which tended to downplay the significance of Stalin’s crimes. In a speech delivered on his video blog on the occasion of the Day of the Political Prisoner last year, Medvedev harshly condemned Stalin’s terror and called for the preservation of the memory of the victims, labelling young Russians’ lack of historical knowledge “worrying”.2 Alexander Etkind has identified the cacophony of interpretations jostling for primacy as a typical characteristic of “post-traumatic space”. Etkind argues that the absence of widely accepted, figurative monuments to the victims of Soviet state terror, as well as large museums, is a result of the fact that the many different interpretations of the era have so far failed to “crystallise” into one single memory that can be represented 1 See http://www.russ.ru/pole/Ploho-s-pamyat-yu-ploho-s-politikoj 2 This day was instituted by dissidents in 1974 and officially recognised as a “feast” day in 1990. Medvedev’s speech can be found on http://hro.org/node/6703. For a commentary in English see http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/2009-202-15.cfm 1 easily.3 The existing monuments for the most part represent the commemorative efforts of political, ethnic or religious groups, often only dedicated to victims pertaining to the respective group. A similar fragmentation can be observed in museums. To the present day Russia has no large central museum of the Gulag and the terror, comparable, for example, to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. As Etkind has pointed out, the creation of such a museum requires a broad social and political consensus on the nature of the events to be commemorated and on the importance of their commemoration. It also requires a degree of critical distance. In the case of Russia, neither the consensus nor the critical distance have been reached yet. On the other hand there is no shortage of museum- worthy objects from the Stalin years. And there exist several hundred institutes whose collections contain a significant amount of objects relating to the Gulag. Most of them are municipal (the ‘local history’ [kraevedcheskie] museums that exist in most towns), others are attached to schools and other institutions, some are private. Only a few of these museums have a status that makes them relevant beyond their immediate region. One of them is the Memorial Museum of the History of Political Repression “Perm’-36” in Kuchino, Perm oblast’, where a former camp for political prisoners has been transformed into a museum. This is the only case in Russia of a museum has emerged on the remains of a prison camp (the penal colony for ordinary criminals continues to function in the vicinity). However, a penal colony at some distance from a medium-sized town in the Ural Mountains is not exactly a tourist attraction. “Perm-36”, just as all the local history museums, is by its very nature exemplary of the fragmentation of Russian historical memory, since all these institutions first and foremost display information and objects relating to events that took place in their own town or region. Indeed, their local limitation is the single biggest threat to all the Gulag-collections in contemporary Russia, first and foremost because they render the respective collections less interesting to a broader public. Moreover, many of these collections were amassed by a single enthusiastic individual, who then also curated the exhibitions in which they feature. There are even people who set up their own museum. Too often these enthusiasts lack museum-specific training. As a result, many exhibitions appear unimaginative. And to make things yet more difficult, in many collections items are insufficiently catalogued, so that potential researchers would find them difficult to work with. Add these factors to the issue of geographical remoteness and it becomes apparent that these exhibitions and objects will almost inevitably disappear when the person in charge of them leaves, retires or dies. 3 Эткинд Александр. Время сравнивать камни. Постреволюционная культура политической скорби и современной России – 2. Ab Imperio, No 2, 2004. P. 35. 2 Project Summary The idea for the Virtual Museum of the Gulag arose as an answer to these specific challenges. In 2004, the St Petersburg Research and Information Center “Memorial” put forward the idea of creating a Virtual Museum of the Gulag as a way of bringing together as many of the existing museum-exhibition initiatives into a single virtual space with the aim of facilitating comparison and searching for potential integration. We were able to find approximately 300 museums, of various levels and statuses- state, public, departmental, school- in whose exhibitions and collections the theme of the Gulag is noticeably present. On the whole, they are Russian museums, but there are also several in Lithuania, Latvia, the Ukraine and Kazakhstan The peculiarity of “The Virtual Museum of the Gulag” is that it is not a computer reproduction of a building that exists “in reality”, but instead creates a new museum establishment. The catalogue of the Virtual Museum of the Gulag refrains from simply merging items that belong to different museums into a single collection. Instead, it has a mode allows the visitor to view any given museum together with its exhibition or exhibitions and individual exhibits as a single entity. Thus the regional flavour and the particular author’s touch are not lost but rather become a part of the general picture. At the same time, digital technology makes it possible to link related material that in reality pertains to different museums. One could, to give a single example, search for “artworks” and would then receive a list of all the exhibits falling into this category, irrespective of the physical museum that holds them. SHOW ON THE EXAMPLE OF PORTRAITS Thus the primary, very practical objective of the Virtual Museum of the Gulag is to make remote regional museums accessible to a broader public, both in Russia and abroad, while at the same time “preserving” the artefacts in virtual form. This preservation work also entails labelling the objects and reconstructing their history as far as this is possible.4 But there is also a second, more philosophical objective: in its entirety, the Virtual Museum of the Gulag reproduces a panoramic history of the Gulag – no longer focussing on local events – that is more complete than that which any single central museum could provide. But more importantly, the sum total of the Virtual Gulag Museum’s varied exhibits provide a very accurate picture of how the Gulag is remembered in contemporary Russia. As such, it is also a museum of memory –a function that is very important indeed. The Catalogue Roughly one third of the museums that interest us, i.e. approximately 100, have already been researched. Over the last year, a database has been created which serves as a digital repository for the Virtual Museum’s collection. You can access this database through its web interface on www.gulagmuseum.org. Presently the database/website contains entries on 98 museums from 6 countries; 514 objects representing the “Necropolis of the Gulag and the Terror”; 2232 individual museum exhibits and 425 monuments. The interface is searchable and equipped with thematic, name, 4 These labels can be used by the “real world” museums; RIC “Memorial” has also run a number of seminars and workshops on museum skills for the staff of small museums.
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