Moscow: death knell for Gulag Museum

Novaya Gazeta explains why the regime wants to repurpose the museum:

“It seems that discussions about the mechanisms of terror – denunciations, ‘enemies of the people’, punitive bureaucracy, closed courts, fear – can all too easily be understood as a reflection of the present. And those who made the decision to close the museum understand this all too well. For those in power, this is toxic: such comparisons sensitise society to today’s arbitrariness and make the language of state propaganda less convincing. It is therefore more advantageous to shift the focus of historical perspective onto issues where the violence comes from outside rather than from within, where the moral line has been drawn in advance and doesn’t require further questions directed at one’s own state.”