Regional Memories of the Great Terror: Representation of the Gulag in Russian Kraevedcheskii Museums

The article examines the representation of the Stalinist repressions in regional and local—kraevedcheskii—museums across several regions of Russia. Different types of exclusion and inclusion of repressions in museum expositions are in focus, revealing several common patterns across the selected case studies: displacement; depersonalization; ahistorical representations. The In the majority of the case studies Gulag is still a geo-historical “blank spot,” erased both from geographical imagination and from the local historical narrative. Still there are few expositions that present the Stalinist repressions as an inseparable part of a place’s identity.