The Virtual Museum of the Gulag Project

 

1. Memory of the Gulag, memory of the terror.

First an important matter of definition: the word ‘Gulag’ in the title means not the concrete institution, nor the Soviet system as a whole, but the system of direct state violence and terror: arrests, shootings, camps, exile, deportation, carried out with the aim of punishing political opponents and restricting freedom and establishing and maintaing complete control over the country. It is in this metaphorical sense that I will use it in my paper.

 

For modern Russia and its understanding of its history, the Gulag is one of the most important defining concepts. The Gulag has entered the culture and life of modern society.

 

But remembrance of the Gulag, remembrance of the terror has not become an integral and inalienable part of the national memory and, as before, remains a fragmentary recollection of local events, which are unconnected with the general conceptual essence.

 

On a nationwide level, consciousness of the past, as a part of the national experience is practically absent (except in the academic sphere), it contradicts contemporary state policy (the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Lavrov, for example publicly announced a resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to be “anti-Russian”). This is where the absence of state programmes dedicated to memory of the terror, and the almost total absence of the theme of the terror and the Gulag in school and higher-education history courses stems from. And, what is most important- also the absence of a public discussion of the past in Russian society.

 

However, while absent on a nationwide level, this memory is palpably present on the personal, family and regional levels, in culture, in society and in intellectual circles. Today it is a set of uncoordinated initiatives, which have a fragmentary, unsystematic and more often than not a regional nature. Therefore the main task is to integrate these intiatives into a united whole and create from them a complete picture of the terror, which could present itself as a part of an alternative national remembrance. In a situation where the state powers’ attitude is one of ill-disposed indifference to this component of national history, such integrating projects can be begun only by society itself.

 

Such projects are being adopted and successfully realised by public organisations which have a cultural-educational leaning. For example, two years ago, “Memorial” society issued the electronic album “Victims of Political Terror in the USSR”, which contained books of memory to the victims of terror, which were issued independently of each other, uncoordinated, in various regions of Russia, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. These were combined into a single list comprising 1 345 000 names.

 

The second project is that which is the subject of this paper. It aims to integrate analogous initiatives in the sphere of material remembrance, most of which take place in museums.

 

2. The Virtual Museum of the Gulag- the ideas involved.

 

In contemporary Russia, there is no “Museum of the Gulag”. There is no concrete building nor is it present in Russian culture as an essential connecting link between knowledge and understanding.

 

It is precisely this state of remembrance which is reflected in the existing museum-exhibition initiatives. Today in Russia there is a totality which is geographically scattered, thematically disparate and the work of enthusiasts and amateurs. In some places it is in the form of a memorial complex or specialised museum, in others it is a stand in a museum of local history and lore, elsewhere still it is separate testimonies to the past: diaries, photographs, letters and documents, preserved in a school or private museum. It is a variety of factual material, presented in different ways in the search for a concept.

 

Two years ago, 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 all of the  various museum-exhibition initiatives into a single virtual space, in order to facilitate their comparison and in the search for potential integration. The peculiarity of the project of “The Virtual Museum of the Gulag” is that its aim is not a computer reproduction of a building that exists “in reality”, but the creation of a new museum establishment which has never before existed, and one in which the regional flavour and the particular author’s touch, which elements are inherent in private initiatives, are not lost but rather become a part of the general picture.

 

The Virtual Musuem of the Gulag (VMG), as the sum total of its varied exhibits will create not only the history of the Gulag but a picture of contemporary remembrance of it.

 

3. The representation of the theme of the Gulag in contemporary museums

 

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.

 

How does our theme look, when represented in these museums (I will talk only about Russian museums)?

It is of the defining and/or main themes in only a few museum exhibitions, the majority of which are public. This is  the museum of political repressions on the base of the political camp in Kuchino (Perm oblast), the museum of the “NKVD Investigative Prison” in Tomsk, the memorial centre attached to a memorial cemetery where Polish prisoners of war are buried, in Mednyi (Kalininskaia oblast), the museum of the history of the Execution of Punishment under the Main Administration for the Execution of Punishment (UIN) in the Kemerovsk oblast (in fact, the museum of Siblag), the museum “Memory of Kolyma” in Iagodnoe (Magadan oblast) and “Penitence” museum in Pechora (Komi), the Memorial to the victims of political repressions of the Balkar people 1944-57 (Nalchik), the museum collections in the Moscow and St Petersburg Memorials, a very weak museum of political exile in Narym (formerly a Stalin museum), an analogous museum in Turukhansk. At a stretch, one could also include the school museum “Makarikha” in Kotlas (Archangelsk oblast) and a few school museums in Komi to this list. In Komi, however, the theme of the Gulag is one of the main ones in a group of raion and town museums of local history and law and in a few departmental museums. And that’s all.

 

In the remaining cases, the theme is represented only in one or two stands or display cases, in temporary thematic exhibitions, to mentions of the Gulag in personal stands which present the biographies of “celebrated fellow countrymen” or is scattered throughout the general exhibition. It is the same story with museum collections. In small, medium sized and sometimes in the main oblast museum of local lore and history there are many materials connected with the repressions , with the area’s past that is linked with the camps, with the special settlers and so on. But these materials are frequently described in a very superficial way, or not described at all; in very few places are they entered on a specific register, even if only in the form of a section in the thematic card index. In the last few years, materials on the theme have been being collected- as a rule haphazardly and unsystematically, and more often than not through the efforts of enthusiasts who work in the museums.

 

With few exceptions, attempts to rise above the regional thematic and make sense of the theme conceptually, put it in the context of national history, present historio-political and cultural problems linked with it to the visitor are absent in museum work on the Gulag. It is also a characteristic of such museums, with few exceptions (Kuchino, Norilsk) that the aspect of individual and collective resistance to the regime is practically unrepresented. This is particularly obvious when one compares the Russian museums with those in Lithuania, where the theme of resistance is one of the main ones.

 

Finally: all of the museum initiatives, without exception, are isolated from one another, and almost all of them are practically unknown. Outside the village, the raion centre or, in the very best case, the oblast, nobody knowns anything about them. All of these peculiarities of the representation of the theme in museums stem directly from the specific condition of remembrance, which I was talking about at the beginning. Our project is aimed at overcoming these peculiarities and, in the end, at changing the state of public remembrance of the terror.

 

4. The Virtual Museum of the Gulag- the current state of the project and its further development

 

What is the current state of the project? Roughly one third of the museums that interest us, i.e. approximately 100, have already been treated: material has been collected, mainly in the form of images of exhibits- approximately 8000 digital pictures. A selection of parts of these collections is displayed on the project’s website, which you now see- 68 museums in 5 countries; 1794 exhibits from these museums. This is not intended to be the Virtual Museum of the Gulag itself: it is only one of its components- an illustrated catalogue of the collections or a “museum of the museums”. Its task is to present a panorama of contemporary material remembrance of the Gulag in the form of a museum.

 

The foundation of the Virtual Museum of the Gulag’s exhibition is a “museum of museums” or “panorama of remembrance”; a catalogue of museum collections. Each element of the register is itself a museum with a ‘visiting card’, the history of its founding, work on its collection, the state of the collection and accompanying activities; it gives an idea of the theme of the collection and its separate exhibits.

 

Three further steps for the development of the project:

1. widening the area covered by the project- continuing the process of ‘treating’ museums and adding to the register, including new memorial spaces in the project- more of that later;

2. work on detailed descriptions of the exhibits, creating a reference facility;

3. creating subsidiary collections (for example, a collection of cinematic and photographic newsreels, a collection of oral-history materials- audio-files and transcripts, a memoir collection and likewise an archive of digitalised research materials and textual sources relevant to the theme).

4. new ways of exhibiting the materials already collected. More details on this.

 

Variants on the permanent exhibition: The plurality of ways of representing the collection is the most important virtues of the Virtual Museum: it allows the visitor to choose to investigate one of the several variations of the exhibition, based on the very same exhibits but organised in different ways according to thematic rubrics, geographical specifications or a list of names.

For example, one exhibition might present the history of state terror in the USSR and the stages of its creation and development, another might describe the phenomenology of the Gulag, a third might be constructed as a “guide through Archipelag”, seen as a geographical object due to its sheer size, and so on. From the point of view of the visitor, each such exhibition becomes an independent museum in its own right. All of these exhibitions aim at a direct and not secondary recreation of one or another image of the past, and their connection with the real museum is limited to an indication of the fact that the prototype of a given image belongs to a concrete museum.

 

Materials on the history of the Gulag serve as subsidiary information for such exhibitions: literature, achive documents, materials on oral history, the “biographies” of separate objects whose electronic images is exhibited in the museum, etc.

 

Thematic Virtual Exhibitions It will be possible to generate such exhibitions automatically by giving the relevant meanings to the descriptive paramaters that link the exhibits with one or another component (indicative, index, rubric, catalogue) of the referance facility. For example:

 

Virtual Excursions Virtual excursions are organised journeys through one of the main exhibitions of the VMG on the basis of associated groups of objects and/or key words. This journey is accomanied by a commentary in the form of a text and, possibly, an audio-recording.

 

This is the projected development of the project.

 

5. 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.

 

And further than this we can examine and describe not only images of real complex images but also complex images of purely virtual origins- a virtual display stand, a panorama of a virtual hall and so on, as new exhibits of our virtual museum.

This is the process of widening the concept of the “exhibit”, a process which can, strictly speaking, be applied to any virtual museum, irrespective of its subject matter.

But there is also a special application for the theme of the Gulag. A whole series of non-museum objects which carry within themselves remembrance of the terror can and must become exhibits of the Virtual Museum of the Gulag. I will name and demonstrate three more types of objects, images of which will form part of the collection of our Virtual Museum and will be displayed in it:

                  a) objects from the Necropolis of the Gulag: the remains of camp cemeteries, places of mass execution, separate graves b) “views (traces) of the Gulag”

c) monuments to the Gulag       This widening of content has followed from our main tasks that I have already talked about: integrating various museum initiatives while preserving their individual natures and uniting history and remembrance in a modern museum.

 

And now- some words about the exhibit of the Gulag as such.

What does this mean: a “Gulag exhibit”?

This is a key problem, and one which is linked with the peculiarities of the theme. The Gulag’s boundaries have been eroded, both in life and in people’s consciousness. It may be precisely this circumstance that partly explains the extremely low standard of descriptions of Gulag exhibits and collections in museums today.  

The main question may therefore be formulated thus: how do we understand the sense of the message embodied in the “Gulag exhibit”? Of course, there is no single way of understanding, but rather  many, and in every separate case we should answer this question again. And every time the answer will shape important decisions. It will define the criteria for selecting exhibits for each exhibition. It will define for each exhibit the decisions made regarding local exhibitions and commentary within the framework of a given exhibition; to put it simply, we should always find the very best method of making the exhibit talk. And the main problem is that Gulag exhibits are, to a surprising degree, disposed to keeping silent.

The first aspect of this problem is that a significant part of the realia of the Gulag is very unspecific. A quilted jacket. An aluminium spoon. Barracks. Half of the country lived in barracks, wore quilted jackets and ate with aluminium spoons.

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, is a packet of “Belomorkanal” cigarettes a “Gulag exhibit”?

And, finally, a third aspect: very often objects, which in themselves bear no relation to the Gulag, are often testimonies to terror. They 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 may become a part of public memory when given to a museum.

Some examples: personal items of a person who was repressed- in themselves are completely neutral.

 

Karsavin’s pencil. What is it? An object which would be perfectly in place in a Karsavin museum (if there were one); Karsavin was an outstanding religious thinker. 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 the museum of the Gulag is to bring out precisely this sense and to make precisely this testimony distinct for the visitor. This task must define the context of possible methods of exhibiting, the structure and content of descriptions of the objects. Corresponding information must not be omitted when compiling an exhibit’s display card.

Another, completely analogous, but still more glaring example is Lenin’s Mausoleum.

Model of the first mausoleum of V.I. Lenin. 1930s. Leningrad. Belonged to I.V. Slavin. Smashed during a police search, glued back together by I.I. Slavina, the owner’s daughter. Marble.

It is clear that in our museum this object would be described not as a Soviet Party-member’s table decoration but as a material testimony to Soviet mythology along with a series of other objects connected with the cult of Lenin, and not even as a personal possession of someone who was shot (for, naturally, all those who were shot had personal possessions). The theme of remembrance defines the sense of this object as an exhibit of the Gulag.

How exactly can we extract their meaning from Gulag exhibits, how exactly can we make them speak? It is necessary to find a separate solution for each category of exhibits, and sometimes for each separate exhibit. The main thing is to understand exactly which task we are setting ourselves, and to understand while doing so, that the task may vary from exhibition to exhibition.

 

Carved box with the inscription “URAL. Nyroblag, 1947. To Ksenia (Reshakovskaia) Gornushkinaia. 6.02.1947” Made as a present to K. Gornushkinaia 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. Gornushkinaia, a former prisoner in Nyroblag. Made for and given to K. Gornushkinaia 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 exist in the descriptions of the exhibits, which in turn means that standard museum legends are completely inadequate for our purposes. We would wish, that such descriptions contained as complete a biography of the item itself and of those people connected with it, as possible (or, at least, that there were links to these biographies within the descriptions), and, possible, other supplementary information. Otherwise, the exhibits will remain silent.

 

Where can the Virtual Museum of the Gulag get this information from?

 

Sometimes it is already present in the “source” museum’s collections. Here is an astonishing exhibit, kept in the Memorial Museum of the Repressions of the Balkar People:  

 

These pebbles were collected in 1944 by an 18-year-old girl in the entrance courtyard to the investigative prison in the town of Nalchik, before being transported. She carried them with her through the Norilsk camps and during the years of her life in the North. Even after her return to Karbardino-Balkaria, she kept them as a reminder of what she had lived through in prison and exile- along with a napkin embroidered in Norilsk. In 2002, when a museum opened in Nalchik, this woman had enough understanding to give these pebbles to it for preservation (and the museum had enough sensitivity to take this handful of ordinary pebbles and keep them). And she gave them with a short accompanying note, which I have just repeated to you.

This is an extreme case. On one hand, an object that is preserved and later exhibited is, by its nature, completely stripped of any marks of individuality- its connection with a human fate is what makes it an exhibit, and the absence of any inherent uniqueness turns it into a staggering artistic testimony, not to a single fate but to tens of thousands of fates. On the other hand, almost all of the necessary supplementary information is contained in the exhibit’s accompanying note, which is kept with it.

But what can be done with an object which has no biography? For example, a basin, found on the the Road of Death. How can the message it hides about the Gulag be revealed to the visitor? We, specialists in this theme, know that by contrast to ethnographical crockery connected with the theme of food, Gulag crockery carries with it a message about hunger. But how can this message be imparted to the visitor?

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 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 poetical museum”. Earlier I talked about the case of a pack of “Belomor” cigarettes. Here is an actual pack, issued in the 1990s  On this pack is the autograph of one of the most well-known former prisoners of Stalinist camps, and in particular of the Belomorsko-Baltic camp, of that time- the academic Dmitrii Sergeevich Likhachev. “And with them is uncle Belomor…” a significant paraphrasing of Pushkin’s lines, and a link to the “Belomor” past of Likhachev himself. This is already a different level of connection with the theme. In one sense, Likhachev is creating a museum artefact, constructing an artistic image and testimony to the Gulag, linking a chance object once again with a biography, his own biography.

The question as to whether these associated objects and contexts should become a part of an exhibit’s description, of its virtual continuation, its exhibition image, or whether they remain merely artistic options, used for a particular exhibition- is not a conceptual but a technical question. And for the virtual museum this question almost loses its meaning, insofar as it boils down to a technical task: developing the software.

 

6. The Virtual Museum of the Gulag as an association.

 

Finally. We regard the Virtual Museum of the Gulag as a constantly active system of maintaining links with the museum association as a whole, and as an important channel of communication for the development of cooperation between separate museums. This should be equal cooperation between large and small museums, since the key factor is not the size or stage of development of the museum, but its collection and its interest in the past. We hope, that this will give additional opportunities for the development of smaller provincial museums. Putting a museum’s exhibitions and collections on the internet will help raise its status in among local cultural and educational institutions. I am pleased to be able to inform you that this association is already being formed and beginning to work.

 

Thank you for your attention.