Statement by Yabloko Chairman, 20.02.2026

Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

Today we have witnessed yet another step in the deliberate dismantling of national memory. The closure of the Gulag History Museum in Moscow and the attempt to “reformat” it [into a museum commemorating the victims of genocide of the Soviet people during WWII] constitute an act of distorting the very idea of preserving the truth about the tragic pages of our past.

We hold sacred the heroism of our people in the World War II. The memory of the heroes and victims of that war is kept alive in hundreds of museums across the country, and rightly so. But the Gulag History Museum was virtually the only institution of its kind — a major centre that bore witness to another tragedy of our people: internal terror, and the millions of our own citizens who fell victim to repression.

Replacing the topic of political repression with that of genocide inflicted on the Soviet people by external forces [during WWII] is an attempt to erase the memory of crimes committed by our state against our own people. One cannot be substituted for the other. The Museum is being destroyed deliberately, in order to deprive society of the opportunity to reflect on the lessons of the past.

The destruction of the museum, alongside the liquidation of the Memorial [human rights society] — which had meticulously preserved the memory of Stalinist repression — and the designation of its foreign branch as an “undesirable organisation,” all bear witness to a consistent policy of rehabilitating Stalinism on the part of the current authorities.

History teaches us that where the repressions of yesterday are deliberately forgotten, the ground is prepared for the continuation of such practices today. Without an honest acknowledgement of the tragedy of the Gulag, it is impossible to build a law-governed, humane, and free Russian state. We demand that the destruction of memory be stopped and that the Gulag History Museum be preserved as an independent institution of truth.

Nikolai Rybakov,

Yabloko Chairman