Russia strips Gulag Museum of Gulag

Russia’s state has discovered a problem: history is useful right up until it becomes evidence.

According to The New York Times, Moscow’s Gulag History Museum—founded to document the Soviet forced-labor system—has been steadily emptied of the very material that made it a museum rather than a monument. Exhibits and archival content that foregrounded mass repression are being removed or reworked, in a broader campaign to domesticate the past into something compatible with today’s war-state ideology. The Times describes a process that looks less like curatorial revision and more like nationalization of narrative: the institution remains, but the “Gulag” part is treated as an embarrassing brand asset.

The mechanics are not subtle. Under Vladimir Putin’s system, memory of Stalinist terror is tolerated when it can be framed as tragedy without culpability—an unfortunate cost of “modernization,” or a regrettable excess in an otherwise glorious imperial arc. What is being targeted is not merely “anti-Soviet” sentiment but the idea that the state can be indicted by its own paperwork. Archives, testimonies, and physical artifacts are dangerous because they make repression legible as policy, not folklore.

This is the predictable endpoint of a state that first centralizes records to govern more efficiently, then tightens access when those same records threaten legitimacy. Bureaucracies love archives as long as archives remain internal. Once citizens can use them to form independent judgments, the filing cabinet becomes a weapons cache.

It is tempting to treat this as a uniquely Russian pathology. Yet the institutional reflex is broader: large organizations manage information primarily to manage risk.

On the same day, the Times reported that the CIA has retracted a set of intelligence reports after an internal review flagged them for “bias.” The article, by Julian E. Barnes, describes a process in which analytic products—already filtered through classification, compartmentalization, and managerial incentives—can be pulled back from circulation when they are deemed methodologically or politically problematic.

The U.S. case is not a Gulag museum being hollowed out, and the CIA is not the Russian presidential administration. But the parallel is clear. In both systems, the public is asked to trust that the institution will police itself: the museum will still “teach history,” the agency will still “deliver objective analysis.” The difference is largely one of degree and coercive context, not of organizational instinct.

The point is painfully consistent: if you want a society that can remember honestly, don’t build a monopoly on records, classification, and access—and then act surprised when the monopolist edits the past. The state’s first censorship tool is not a censor’s stamp; it is ownership of the archives.