The Gulag History Museum was opened in Moscow in 2001, on the initiative of historian Anton Antonov-Ovsienko, who was repressed after his parents. He spent 13 years in the camps. In this museum you can learn about the most tragic page in the history of Russia of the 20th century: the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s.
The Russian transcription of the word "Gulag" means "The Chief Administration of the Camps." It began to form in the late 1920s. In 1924, Joseph Stalin replaced Vladimir Lenin as head of state, but at first he did not have sole power. In the 1920s, prison camps were no different from those that functioned under the tsarist regime. However, the number of prisoners grew rapidly and new prison camps began to appear all over the country.
The story of the creator of the Gulag History Museum, Anton Antonov-Ovsienko, is interesting. His father took an active part in the October Revolution of 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power. Antonov-Ovsienko led the storming of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg and arrested the Provisional Government. During the Civil War, he commanded the Soviet Army in Ukraine. It was the most difficult part of the front, where Denikin`s troops were advancing.
It would seem that his services to the Soviet government are enormous, but in 1922, during the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky, he supported Trotsky. Stalin remembered this story. Then Antonov-Ovsienko worked as a diplomat in Europe for 15 years, but during the repressions of 1937 Antonov-Ovsienko was recalled from Europe, arrested and shot.
When parents were arrested and declared "enemies of the people", the same arrest awaited the children. They were declared "children of enemies of the people" and were also exiled to camps. At the same time, no one tried to prove their guilt. This is what happened with Anton Antonov-Ovsienko. This is the fate of only one person. He was able to survive for 13 years in the harsh conditions of the camps. After Stalin`s death in 1953, he, like hundreds of thousands of other people, was immediately released.
During the Great Terror of 1937-38, millions of people suffered, tens of thousands were shot, and in many cases it was just violence against competitors. Denunciations were written against them, people were arrested and exiled to camps without investigation.
Many people because of these false denunciations were shot after the trials, the so-called "Triples". Three investigators in an accelerated mode simply approved death sentences. In total, during the existence of the Gulag system from 1930 to 1956, about 20 million people were subjected to repression. 700 thousand of them were shot. In the Museum of the History of the Gulag, you can see cipherograms signed by Stalin and other top leaders, on the basis of which thousands of people were arrested.
The Gulag History Museum was created to preserve the memory of these events so that they would never happen again. Some halls of the Gulag History Museum are stylized as camp barracks, they contain personal belongings of prisoners, as well as recreated the way of their life.
In some halls of the museum you can see the structure of the Gulag camps. There were so many of them that the imprisoned people began to be used as slaves on the gigantic infrastructure constructions of the Stalin period, for example, on the laying of the navigable White Sea Canal (227 km, 19 locks), which the prisoners dug by hand. Hundreds of thousands of people died in these jobs. Also here you can learn about the Gulag on the Solovetsky Islands, this camp became a symbol of that era.
