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. 3 geographical, object and bibliographical indices. A significant part of the material has been translated into English and the database will be available in English shortly.
The database is both an independent information resource and the basis for the future “Virtual Museum of the Gulag”. The next year will be devoted the creation of virtual exhibitions, excursions and lessons that include multimedia and interactive features. The existence of such exhibitions on the website marks the transition from a mere information resource to a virtual museum. Moreover, in due course the Virtual Museum of the Gulag will feature comprehensive information packages on various aspects of Soviet political repressions. All the pictures and textual materials can be freely used e.g. for teaching purposes. Once established, the Museum’s website will also offer a discussion forum and the possibility for users to upload their own material.
Exhibits of the Virtual Museum of the Gulag
Understanding the term “exhibit” in the context of the VMG
The possibilities offered by the Virtual Museum of the Gulag give us a new approach to understanding the term “exhibit”. A virtual exhibit does not necessarily have to be a digital image of a single real exhibit from an exhibition or collection in a real museum. It can also be an image of a real exhibition stand or display case, a panorama of an exhibition, or the museum as a whole The VMG’s exhibits include: Real museums- as the sum total of the exhibitions, collections (and as a demonstration of different forms of work with remembrance; Real exhibitions, as the sum total of exhibits (and as a demonstration of different artistic and conceptual choices); Single exhibits (and ways of presenting them in real museums and exhibitions). In doing so, objects from all points in the hierarchy are seen, in a sense, to be equal. . Show the series: museum- exhibition stand/display case – exhibit (Tomsk). .
But museums are not the only sources of material memory of the Gulag. There are different groups of non-museum objects which have a direct relation to our topic, and as such must become exhibits of the Virtual Museum of the Gulag. Just as the museums, these objects are scattered all throughout Russia and Eastern Europe. Below I will name and demonstrate the three main types of such objects: a) the burial sites of those who fell victim to political repression, i.e. the remains of camp cemeteries, cemeteries of special settlers, execution sites, marked and unmarked mass graves, individual graves. We have called this group of objects the Necropolis of the Gulag /show / b) the traces the Gulag has left in the landscape. These can take the form of a building – a prison or court building, or remains of a camp – they can be the sites where prisoners used to labour – quarries, large or small objects such as the Belomorkanal or the Mertvaya doroga – or the panorama of entire cities that were erected by prisoners of the Gulag show vyshka/abandoned railway/Belomorkanal/Norilsk
4 c) monuments to the Gulag – many, but by no means all of these, are markers on the graves of victims, but there are also public monuments /show from file
Once again it is digital technology that makes it possible to include these objects in the Virtual Gulag Museum. There is no fundamental difference between the picture of a single exhibit, such as a spoon found on a former camp site, and the picture of an entire city. And once again we apply the already mentioned principle of integrating diverse objects from diverse sources while preserving their individual character. It is possible to just look at gravestones and –markers as a group, but all the gravestones will also appear in the section devoted to the relevant burial site. Moreover, the non-museum objects also follow the principle of showing history and how this history is remembered today side by side: historical and anthropological information about burial sites (many of which are not marked) is presented alongside monuments (the form of material memory par excellence) and information about memorial ceremonies held at particular monuments or memorialised cemeteries.
Individual Exhibits and their Stories
But let us now turn to individual items and ways of creating exhibitions using these items.
What does this mean: a “Gulag exhibit”? This is a key problem, and one which is linked with the peculiarities of the theme. The first aspect of this problem is that a significant part of the realia of the Gulag is very unspecific. An aluminium bowl. A quilted jacket. An aluminium spoon. Barracks. /some panoramas of Kuchino and exhibits/ Half of the country lived in barracks, wore quilted jackets and ate with aluminium spoons. What makes this bowl different from other bowls? What history can it tell us, if any? We know nothing about this bowl spoon, except that it was found at the site of a particular former camp, which was operative at a particular time. How can we elicit its story? This is the main problem with many of the exhibits of the Gulag – they are unspecific and, to a surprising degree, disposed to keeping silent.
The second aspect is “supplementary” to the first: the deep penetration of the Gulag into every sphere of daily life- not only in the past but also in the present. This again makes it more difficult to work out criteria for selection. For example, the Belomorkanal was built by prisoners of the Gulag. Does that fact automatically turn a packet of “Belomorkanal” cigarettes into a “Gulag exhibit”?
And, finally, a third aspect: very often objects, which in themselves bear no relation to the Gulag, become Gulag exhibits due to the pressure of circumstance and their own private history and biography. This happens most often if an object features in the fates of individuals and becomes therefore a carrier of memory, of that very same personal and family memory that can enter public memory when given to a museum.
Let us begin with the third aspect – the challenges presented by objects that bear no relation to the Gulag but have become vehicles of memory due to circumstance.
Karsavin’s pencil. Here we have have a pencil that used to belong to the philosopher and religious thinker Leonid Karsavin. It would be perfectly in place in a Karsavin 5 museum (if there were one). Or it would be in place in the Kaunass university where he taught for many years. Or, if worst came to worst, in the Museum of Russian life abroad (Muzei Russkogo Zarubezh’ia). What makes this pencil a “Gulag exhibit”? A single circumstance: the fact that this pencil was given by Karsavin’s daughter not to those museums but to a museum in Inta, where Karsavin served his sentence and died. This makes the object a witness to his memory- to the family’s memory of the prisoner of the Gulag. And the task of a museum is to elicit this – to communicate the object’s testimony to the visitor. This aim must define how we exhibit the object and how we label and catalogue it. Most importantly, this information must not be omitted when compiling an exhibit’s display card.
There are many different ways of exhibiting the same object, depending on the exhibition. To give one single example, here is a wooden box:
Carved box with the inscription “URAL. Nyroblag, 1947. To Ksenia (Reshakovskaia) Gornushkinaia. 6.02.1947” Made as a present to K. Gornushkina by an unidentified prisoner. It is clear that the label given to such an object will depend on the theme of the exhibition. If we are creating an “ethnographical” exhibition, “Decorative Applied Arts in the Gulag” then the label should look something like this: Carved wooden box. 21.5 cm x 9cm x 5cm. Carving, poker-work. Made by an unidentified prisoner. Nyroblag, 1947. But if we are creating an exhibition “There is life everywhere”, a completely different label will be needed, one which goes against the canon of museum theory: A present (hand-made wooden box) received by Ksenia Gornushkina (Reshakovskaia) from a fellow prisoner on her birthday (?) Nyroblag, 1947. Here the first word is not “box”, as usually required by convention, but the words “A present”. And for the exhibition “Remembrance of the Gulag”, the label takes on a third form: Wooden box, preserved in the family of K. Gornushkina, a former prisoner in Nyroblag. Made for and given to K. Gornushkina by her fellow camp prisoners in 1947. Given to the St Petersburg RIC “Memorial” for preservation by her relatives in 1993.
But of course, in order to be able to create such specific labels ad hoc, it is necessary to have a lot of information at one’s disposal. This means that all of this information must be included in the descriptions of the exhibits, which in turn means that standard museum catalogue entries are completely inadequate for our purposes. We would wish for such descriptions to contain as complete a biography of the item itself as possible, as well as a biography of the people connected with it (at least there must be links to these biographies in the descriptions), and other supplementary information. Otherwise the exhibits will remain silent.
Another issue that is particular to the Virtual Museum of the Gulag as a museum of memory is the approach towards originality. Here you see a mug, held in the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Kaunas, Lithuania. What is the story of this mug? Z. Kasheta, a former inmate of the camps in Vorkuta, donated this mug to the Museum in the 1990s, and it became part of an exhibition on the Gulag. Later, the Museum of Resistance and Deportation joined the Virtual Gulag Museum. However, when staff of “Memorial” examined the mug, which is strangely pristine, before photographing it they found a price tag on the bottom of the mug from which it is clear that it was sold in a
6 shop after the currency reform in the mid-1960s.5 What happened here? Evidently Mr Kasheta bought the mug some time ago because it reminded him of the crockery he used in the camp and then gave it to the museum as an object that reminded him of the Gulag – to form part of a collection on everyday life in the camps.
For an anthropological museum aiming to present everyday life in the Gulag such an item would be worthless, as it has never been used in a camp. But for a museum of memory this mug is particularly valuable, as it shows us how memory becomes attached to objects. What Mr Kasheta had been doing, essentially, is creating an object of memory. And let us not forget that he has done so by infusing an unspecific everyday object with his own biography. The question of the “fake” mug raises a number of seminal questions that museums need to consider before creating exhibitions. One of them is how memory that is profoundly individual can be communicated in such a way that it enters public memory, bearing in mind that only those who have lived through events themselves have “real” memory,6 and how objects can help us in the task make this memory accessible – palpable – to the visitor. 7
The second question concerns the nature of the objects to which individuals – survivors – attach their memory. The collections of the various museums that participate in the Virtual Gulag Museum suggest that many of those who have experienced repression and imprisonment keep or create physical objects as keepsakes. Thus memory comes to “reside” in these objects, and as the example of the Lithuanian mug shows, it is often not important whether the object concerned is original or not. From our practice we know that individuals who present such objects to a museum often do so out of a desire to ensure that their memory (or that of their parents) does not die with them. In other words, their actions are explicit attempts at making private memory public. And we, as museum professionals accepting these objects, accept the contention that they carry memory, as well as the implicit task entrusted to us by the donors – to use our professional knowledge to communicate their memories to our visitors.
Knowledge of history – the history of one’s own people and that of others – is important for the integrity of every society. In this sense, the history of the Gulag is nothing “special”. People must know about it, and material objects, accompanied by facts and figures, can help us impart this historical knowledge to the younger generation. But in the case of the Gulag, just as with other national and international catastrophes that human beings have inflicted on one another, there is yet another element at work. At
5 The catalogue entry in the Virtual Gulag Museum reads: “Кружка с надписью: "Varkuta / 50-55 m. / Kašeta. Z. / O.L.P.-59" подарена Музею сопротивления и депортаций в 1990-е политзаключенным Зенонасом Кашетой. Предположительно, З. Кашета купил эту кружку и сделал на ней надписи перед тем, как передать ее в музей. Создание артефакта, вероятно, обусловлено желанием представить лагерный быт - "точно такая кружка, как была у меня в лагере". В музее кружка представлена как подлинная вещь с Воркуты, с этикеткой такого содержания: "Алюминиевая кружка, принадлежавшая Зенонасу Кашете. Воркута, ОЛП №59. 1950-1955".(Фотофиксация 24.08.2008.)” 6 Jorge Semprun, a Spanish writer who survived the KZ Buchenwald, observed that “a day is coming when no one will actually remember the smell [of burning flesh]. It will be nothing more than a phrase, a literary reference, an idea of an odour. Odourless, therefore.” Jorge Semprun, Literature or Life (London: Viking, 1998) 7 The question of whether material objects can be vehicles of memory is hotly debated. One work that raises this question and presents a number of articulate challenges to this thesis, which is widely accepted in Western museum culture, is Adrian Forty, Susanne Kuchler (eds.), The Art of Forgetting (Oxford; New York: Berg, 1999). However, this discussion is for the most part concerned with collective memory as represented by monuments and the question how, if at all, they can embody memory and for what purpose. 7 least since the Holocaust there seems to be a generally accepted consensus that it is not enough to simply pass on the historical facts about such catastrophes. Rather, they need to be remembered in a way that is maximally close to the memory of an eyewitness. In other words, they need to be remembered in a way that avoids sanitising the horror of the experience. This is part of the rationale behind programmes that send Holocaust survivors into schools to tell children of their experience.8
Presumably, exposure to this kind of “living history”, as far is this is possible, provides some degree of inoculation for subsequent generations against the temptation of political ideologies similar to those that were responsible for the catastrophe in question. Hearing a story – the story of a particular individual – is far more evocative – far more memorable – than reading a textbook or hearing a lecture. Human beings seem inherently attracted to narrative. Stories allow us to make sense of our environment, to grapple with experiences and to empathise with others in a way that factual information never can.
Creating Exhibitions with Unspecific Objects
Of course people who visit a historical or anthropological museum are looking for factual information. And the Virtual Museum of the Gulag is not different in this respect. But I would argue they also look for something else, at least when they visit a curated exhibition, an exhibition that does not only present objects, but also follows an aesthetic conception. What do they hope to learn from it that they cannot learn from a text with illustrations? I believe that one of the crucial differences lies in the power of the stories that well-made exhibitions can tell.
In the case of an object with a known, personal, history – i.e. Karsavin’s pencil, Gornushkaia’s box, Kasheta’s mug presented above – it is much easier to harness the power inherent in the object’s real story. But what can be done with an object which has no biography? For example, our nondescript aluminium bowl. We, as specialists on this topic, know that unlike the crockery we are used to seeing in ethnographic exhibitions, which tells us something about food culture, Gulag crockery carries within it a message about hunger, the constant, debilitating scarcity that undermined the prisoners’ health and contributed to their premature death. But how can this message be imparted to the visitor? This piece of information is generic. Hunger in the Gulag concerned hundreds of thousands of people, and the historical fact, rendered in the dry, distanced language of the academic paper or legal document, does not bring this hunger closer to us – or to the piece of crockery we see in the display case. We are looking for a solution to these problems through constructing contexts, through building up associated series of objects. And this virtual technology gives a wealth of other opportunities. The first exhibition of the Virtual Gulag Museum features generic items from the Soviet camps, mostly items of crockery, which are accompanied by an audio-commentary consisting of quotations from the memoirs of camp survivors. Thus we have linked generic objects to the memoirs of individuals, without any claim that there is any “objective”, “cause-and- effect” link. Example of bowls
8 Several museums in the East of Germany that work with the memory of the communist regime also employ this technique, inviting people who were imprisoned by the Stasi to give talks to visitors. The Museum of the Stasi Prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen has developed a controversial concept for guided tours, which requires visitors to the prison buildings to follow a guide who used to be a prisoner in this institution. 8
A literary text like this one is much more evocative than a lapidary commentary of the sort “when looking at crockery from the Gulag we should bear in mind that prisoners were often short of crockery, in some places there were only two bowls for every three prisoners”. This is a paradox – in order to become accessible to the “general” visitor, “general” experience needs to be individualised. Then and only then does it does it have the chance to trigger in us the tiniest moment of understanding – through a process of recapitulating, through the power of memory – how an individual life that was full of minute detail, just as our own, was crushed, and that this was done hundreds of thousands of times. And then we understand, rather than acknowledge, the enormity of what happened then, back in history, in a foreign country.
This is only the beginning. The excerpt of the memoir could be linked to a sshort biography of the memoirist. The biography, in turn, could lead the visitor to the biographies of other people who were interned in that camp, or to a list of camps that existed in the same region, or to more objects that used to belong to the person whose biography they are reading, or even to more bowls and other typical items of everyday use. Show excerpt from Veshchi Gulaga
Communicating and encouraging memory and conveying factual information that is useful for academic research are two different functions, and a modern museum – “real” or “virtual” should be able to accomplish both. The Virtual Museum of the Gulag cannot be constructed exclusively on rational cause-and-effect connections. It is fated to be, to use the words of the distinguished British museum curator Julian Spalding “a poetic museum”.9
9 Julian Spalding, The Poetic Museum (Munich/London: Prestel), 2002. The book is a passionate argument for new “poetic” concepts to bring historical collections to life for the contemporary visitor, featuring many examples from British and international museums. 9