Reservation for memory?

The strangest feeling that you experience in the new Museum of the History of the Gulag is the desire to smile. You clearly realize where you are, you perfectly understand that any manifestation of a positive emotion is inappropriate, but the muscles of the lips are shamelessly stretched in a smile. Why? The point is the light and unobtrusive, but quite tangible “Disney effect” (if you use the term of the historian Julius Sheps), produced by the museum.

The exposition begins at the entrance. In the building, where the State Museum of the History of the Gulag created in 2001 by historian Anton Antonov-Ovseenko was once a dormitory of the Moscow metro. Architects Dmitry Baryudin and Igor Aparin from the Kontora Bureau fully coped with the task of making a memory museum out of the hostel. The facade and ends of the building, they faced with copper slabs - over time, the material will darken and give the structure a gloomy view. The red -brick wall, which goes to the gravity lane, where the entrance to the museum is located, the architects retained, restored, and part of the windows located on this side was provided with wooden shutters designed to symbolize the stabbed windows in the places of imprisonment and lack of freedom (new, polished to the brilliance of the board, as well as a cheerful yellow -brush trim of horizontal. The walls are slightly dissonated with the general mood of the building, but this is not annoying). In general, the building is impressive and setting up on serious museum experience.

You go inside and immediately rest against the glass door, which leads to the courtyard resembling prison - later it is planned to break the “Garden of Memory”, where plants and stones from the territories of former camps are promised to bring. In the meantime, the door to the courtyard is closed, but because the museum has only recently opened, and the “Garden of Memory” has not yet been created, or because of the wet time of the year, or because I came at an hour not intended for walking in the air is incomprehensible. However, in the Gulag museum, you treat the locked doors as a proper.

On a ticket issued for 300 rubles with a cashier, “control” is written in capital letters.

At this stage, a smile, if it began to be born in the depths of my consciousness, it was possible to keep it there. But later, when I examined the museum, there was a funny incident. In one of the parts of the exposition, I watched videos in which the victims of the Stalinist repressions recalled the Gulag’s experience when a loud choral singing was suddenly heard from the neighboring hall (more about this below). Without thinking twice, I closed the prudence, seemed, the installed door - and continued to listen to video offices. Two seconds later, the door swung open, and the caretaker strictly (albeit politely) asked: “Did you close the door? We are not supposed to be. ” After a second, softening, she added: “But since music interferes with you, let the door be encouraged closed.” I don’t know if a cultural memory or business in the working instruction said in a caretaker, but it turned out symbolic.

Together, all these effects, created consciously or arising by accident, involve the viewer, enter the theme of the museum and allow you to better perceive the content of the exposition. But the idea that “our whole life is a gulag” certainly makes you smile sadly: it is painfully a high fence that is surrounded by a museum, closed doors and “not supposed” remind of the reality of the present, in addition to the historical one. This also has one more side: the visitor may have a logical continuation of empathy - the feeling that he fully understands what tests the victims of the Stalinist terror went through. For a similar effect, by the way, they more than once criticized the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Almost the central place in the museum’s exposition is occupied by a railway car, identical to the one in which the Nazis transported Jews to Aushwitz and other death camps. You can go into a pure and pleasantly smelling wagon, stand there, think, cry - but even a very rich empathic experience will not help the visitor to the end to understand what it was like to go in an unknown direction in the same, but unbearably stinking excrement and a wagon, when you are surrounded by so many people that it is impossible to change the pose, when they pray, they cry, lose their minds and die. The border between a completely natural and necessary violation of emotional balance, caused by a sense of empathy, and self -deception is narrow. As a result, there is a risk of false identification of a visitor to the museum with victims of Nazism.

The creators of the Gulag History Museum, however, manage not to cross this border. My smile is explained by a more dissolved context in the air than the features of the exposure.

You can say without a shadow of doubt that the museum turned out. And this despite the fact that its creation was accompanied by strange - given the lack of public consensus about Stalinist repressions - silence: professional historians and specialists from memory knew very little about what kind of gulag the creators plan to talk about - there was no serious public discussion of this topic in the course of preparing a new concept, nor at the stage of its implementation, nor after the opening of the museum for the general public. Nevertheless, the museum has a restraint and quite objectively telling about terror, which was held in the Soviet state from 1917 to the death of Stalin, with an understandable focus on the activities of the Main Directorate of Camps and places of imprisonment. At the same time, the modern visitor without any problems with concentration and with the minimum interest in the topic has practically no chance to get bored (which could not be said about the previous museum, which was outdated long before the decision to create a new one).

The creators of the exposition skillfully combine traditional and new museum technologies and methods of influencing the viewer: authentic objects, photographs and documentary chronicles, video offices of repressed, audio recordings, archival documents, etc. It is fundamentally important that the visitor is actively involved in communication with exhibited objects: here you can pick up a wooden tablet and read a facial copy of the archival document on it; Here - to sit at the table, reminiscent of those that Soviet investigators worked, to get the affairs of the prisoners from the safes and flip them out; There - to leave a note with his answer to the question of what everyone can do so that the Gulag does not happen again (“There will be no repetition if I ... I will vote for someone I consider it necessary,” one of the notes reads; “... if I become the president and I will become an immortal leader, I will rule wisely and not any [ sic !] Camps”, the other, written by the uneven schoolchild A young man named Nikita Solntsev).

The rate in the museum is not made on affective techniques (say, photographs of corpses or windows with human hair in Auschwitz and other memorial complexes located in the former Nazi death camps), capable of bringing a person to a complex psychological state, which manifests itself primarily somatically (increased heartbeat, increased blood pressure, etc.), but may have a variety of negative consequences for health health. man. Instead, less conflicting empathic instruments are used that direct the emotional reaction of visitors towards empathy for the victims of repression.

The most striking example is the design of the doors brought from different Russian prisons presented in the first hall. Placed around the perimeter of a small rectangle, they create a feeling of a closed space resembling a prison. You can go inside, stand up, think that when there are only doors to the prison chambers and wherever you look - everywhere non -freedom, metamorphoses begin to occur with society. The installation makes us reflect, but does not claim to be the authenticity of prison experience and in this sense stands on a par with the best world examples. For example, the “Gallery of the Missing ) artist VIA Lewandowski in the Jewish Museum of Berlin: this is a wall of black glass reflecting light; If you approach it from different sides, you can hear more than 40 audio recordings with a description of objects and phenomena belonging to the German-Jewish culture and destroyed during Nazism. By the power of the statement, the Gallery can only be compared with the building of the museum himself, built by the architect Daniel Libeskind.

Fortunately, the curators of the Moscow Museum of the History of the Gulag avoid the temptation to recreate a “standard” prison camera or a “standard” camp hut. For this, by the way, you can go to Perm-36, which-contrary to the “concept of state policy on the perpetuating of the memory of victims of political repressions”, approved on August 15, 2015, is turned in fact by the new leadership from the museum of repressions to the museum of the correctional system and in which you can visit the nurses with lace tablecloths on the tables and in pleasantly smelling. The barracks, where neat woolen blankets are covered on the beds, and there are boots in the halls. It looks so cozy that even the installations of Ilya Kabakov, dedicated to Soviet communal services and their (unhapped) residents, look worse. But Perm-36 is a different, anxious and sad story. It is not clear why to destroy the first and only memorial museum of political repressions in Russia, which occupies the buildings of the former camp, and at the same time create a large and expensive museum in Moscow dedicated to the same topic.

In the Gulag museum, they did not recreate a prison camera or hut, but they hung a huge and detailed plan of the “Typical Camp for 5000 people” in the first hall. The notes to the plan say, for example, that “[y] frequency is building. In each individual case, it is selected depending on the conditions of the terrain, the amenities of its operation. ” Perhaps that is why so many camps were built in Magadan, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk regions, and the Komi Republic - definitely, taking into account the “conditions of the terrain”. The label that would explain why this plan hangs here and how such instructions were put into practice, is not available, so the exhibit is puzzling.

In the same hall, the contours of the cells of Soviet prisons were applied on the floor, indicating their size (Butyrskaya prison - 72 sq. M., “Vladimir Central” - 24 sq. M, “sailor silence” - 9 sq. M, “Crosses” - 7 sq. M) - the idea itself is not bad, but without explanation, how many people were contained in each cell, it is not much value. The creators of the exposition understand this: to the request to clarify what task this part of the exposition performs, the museum’s representative replied that "so far it is more likely a designer technique for organizing space."

To continue the examination of the exposition, you need to climb a metal staircase - and the noise of steps with a terrible echo spreads throughout the museum space. The second hall is dedicated to a large terror - in the first explication, it is said without abysses that “[c] Yel I.V. Stalin - the main manager of mass repressions - was simple: to destroy any possibility of a political opposition, to stop any attempts to dissent. Intra-party discussions often ended for Stalin’s opponents with arrest, prison, camp, and from the second half of the 1930s-an execution. People lost the ability to lose and realize anything, everywhere searched for “pests” and “enemies of the people”. ” The design of the information panel uses a photograph with the image of Muscovites observing the full solar eclipse on June 19, 1936, and on the fields there was an excerpt from the large modern explanatory dictionary of the Russian language, explaining that the eclipse is, on the one hand, an astronomical phenomenon, and on the other, “temporary duality of consciousness”. In general, the metaphor is understandable and partly justified: people lived in reality that the political system perverted, and therefore saw enemies even in the neighbors on the stairwell. But I could not overcome the idea that the transfer of an accent to the collective darkenness of consciousness removes part of responsibility for what happened from Stalin. I don’t know if the authors of the text thought about it, but it turned out ambiguously.

In the same hall you can see a series of posters that the Stalinist regime used to combat the disagreement: slogans like “Long live the NKVD” and “king, pop and fist are enemies of the people” speak for themselves. Nearby is an enlarged copy of the secret order of the NKVD No. 00447, which was the result of the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All -Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on the beginning of the repressive campaign against “anti -Soviet elements”. This order established the estimated numbers of people who were to be repressed in each of the Soviet republics: in the Belorussian SSR it was necessary to arrest 12,000 people, in the Georgian - 5000, Azerbaijani - 5250, Armenian - 1,500 and so on, while the excess of the “limits” had to be coordinated with Yezhov. Indeed, having accustomed to overfulfill the plan, the heads on the ground have repeatedly turned to the center with a request to increase the “quota”.

A screen is also installed here on which the list of repressed, slowly moving from the bottom up, and on the next screen replace the photos of individual victims, indicating the name, nationality, profession, as well as the accusation, the date of arrest and the sentence: “Miroshnikov Ivan Ivanovich (1894–1938). Russian. Deputy People's Commissar of Finance of the USSR. Accused of participating in a counter -revolutionary terrorist organization. Arrested on February 3, 1938. Shot on July 28, 1938. " This technique traditional for museums allows you to “humanize” the numbers from history textbooks, to update them in collective memory. In the already mentioned by the Washington Memorial Museum of the Holocaust, for example, visitors are given “ Identification Cards”, each of which tells the story of one person: in the process of examining the exposition, visitors symbolically live someone else's life - and death.

One of the explication panels presents information about the military collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, which was "in] the most important component of the mechanism of the Stalinist terror." The text is accompanied by a photograph of the building in which the collegium was located, and the address is Nikolskaya Street (in 1935-1990 - October 25), the house is 23. This is an important, albeit insignificant, even on the scale of Moscow, a step towards the return of memory to urban space. By the way, the site “Topography of Terror” recently launched by the International Society “Memorial” allows you to study in detail the Moscow places of mass executions, burials and conclusions, as well as buildings where concentration camps and sharashki were located in the capital. The site is constantly updated with information that researchers continue to collect under the guidance of the Cultural programs of the Memorial, Alexandra Polivanova, and it would be good if he found a place in the exposition of the Gulag Museum - apparently, the museum could afford to install an additional screen with a sensory panel so that visitors can make a tour of memorable places in Moscow at least virtually.

The last section of this hall is devoted to indicative trials. On an inconvenient organized information panel, one can read that “[t] are the most consequences of economic transformations (meaning, apparently, collectivization and industrialization. - author's note ) and an alarming international situation (I would like more specifics, taking into account the significance of the phrase in the context of today. - approx. Author ) were sources of stress in Soviet society. One of the ways to direct the dissatisfaction of citizens in another channel was the organization of indicative processes over the “enemies of the people” ... ”Here you can read about the“ Shakhty case ”(during which 53 engineering workers were brought to judicial responsibility-I would like more careful handling of the wording, because holding the presence of a crime, and many defendants were innocent victims of the repressive arbitrariness), the “process of the Communist Party” and other fabricated court cases. It is difficult to demonstrate archival chronicles of court hearings, including with Stalin’s participation, but it is difficult to read labels located in the twilight.

Again going down, you get into a spacious hall with illuminated windows, which are worthy of attention both with aesthetic and substantive points of view. There are few presented items - you can see everything. There are letters here, scratched by prisoners on pieces of fabric, home -made notebooks, needlewoman. There are several tablets next to the windows, where you can read in detail about each of the objects presented, including its mention in the memoirs of former prisoners. Perhaps the most impressive exhibit is masks of fabric that protected prisoners from frost and wind. These are ordinary rag circles carved from improvised materials (judging by the color - pillowcase, sheet or old summer dresses) with holes for the eyes and mouth. Slightly illuminated by cold bluish light, they look so touching that the heart is compressed. These and other items are part of the exposition called “from Solovki to Kolyma. National memory of the Gulag ”; они привезены из музейных собраний со всей России и будут постоянно пополняться другими предметами.

Над витринами возвышается большой экран, на котором демонстрируются видеоинсталляции «Три духовных хора» и «Agnus Dei». В первой использованы хроники из Российского государственного архива кинофотодокументов и материалы, собранные в ходе экспедиции сотрудников музея к местам расположения лагерей на севере Чукотки и в Магаданской области. Видео сопровождается «Тремя духовными хорами» Альфреда Шнитке. Вторая видеоинсталляция представляет собой движение облаков над чукотским лагерем, под сопровождение хоральной композиции «Агнец Божий» американского композитора Сэмюэля Барбера. Звуки песнопений слышны во всех концах музея (именно они мешали мне смотреть в соседнем зале видеосвидетельства репрессированных), и можно предположить, что это смысловой центр всей экспозиции. Явный религиозный окрас видеоинсталляций не раздражает, а напротив кажется уместным и создает подходящее настроение.

Упомянутые выше свидетельства жертв сталинских репрессий, транслируемые на экранах в двух небольших комнатах, сняты, подобраны и смонтированы аккуратно и со вкусом — обычно в музеях памяти ограничиваешься одним-двумя видеовоспоминаниями; здесь же хочется посмотреть все до конца. Часть видеоинтервью представлена в виде «Живой книги»: когда листаешь страницы, размещенный на потолке проектор включает записи свидетельств разных людей. Технология простая и понятная, но очень актуальная для современного музея: детям такой способ восприятия информации должен понравиться больше всего.

Большое внимание в музее уделено месту прессы в советской политической системе — и маленьким внутрилагерным газетам, которые призваны были рассказывать, как проходит перевоспитание заключенных трудом (на одну из таких газет, под названием «Перековка на строительстве канала Москва – Волга», некоторое время работал фотограф Александр Родченко), и главному рупору ВКПб — газете «Правда». В частности, отдельно рассказывается о том, какую роль сыграли СМИ в «деле врачей».

Можно резюмировать, что музей сделан добротно и качественно. Он не просто честно рассказывает о самой ужасной части советской истории, но делает это интересно и увлекательно, а в ситуации большого массива информации это принципиально важно.

Но в то же время некоторые акценты, сознательно или неосознанно сделанные создателями экспозиции, вызывают недоумение. Скажем, удивляет настойчивость нарратива о значении лагерной экономики для всего народного хозяйства СССР (этому посвящен целый зал, с детальными описаниями использования заключенных в разных отраслях промышленности), тогда как о повседневности, о существовании в лагере отдельного человека рассказывается сравнительно мало.

Выглядит странным и отсутствие хотя бы пары слов о политических репрессиях в СССР после смерти Сталина и упразднения системы лагерей: все-таки в массовом сознании ГУЛАГ часто ассоциируется с советской репрессивной системой в целом, а политические узники были в Советском Союзе и после смерти Сталина. Экспозиция завершается стендом, посвященным реабилитации жертв сталинского террора. И хотя здесь отмечается, что выход на свободу не всегда сопровождался полной реабилитацией бывшего узника — и многим из них пришлось еще долгие годы бороться за восстановление справедливости, ощущение недосказанности сохраняется.

Вызывает сожаление и ограниченное сотрудничество музея с «Мемориалом» (в одной из витрин можно увидеть разве что предоставленную обществом самодельную записную книжку, принадлежавшую Бэлле Нусинбойм). Как известно, мемориальцы занимаются сохранением памяти о репрессиях более 25 лет; в архивах общества хранятся ценнейшие предметы и экспонаты, многие из которых сильно обогатили бы экспозицию музея. Но «Мемориал», по утверждению Минюста, подрывает основы российского конституционного строя, а сотрудники Музея истории ГУЛАГа не спешат выступать в защиту общества — хотя и те и другие делают одно дело. На фоне происходящего вокруг передать или предоставить на время хотя бы часть коллекции «Мемориала» музею было бы как минимум преждевременно. Слишком много усилий потребовалось мемориальцам, чтобы собрать эту коллекцию, и слишком непонятны на сегодняшний день перспективы «Концепции государственной политики по увековечению памяти жертв политических репрессий».

The discovery in Moscow of the Gulag History Museum raises many questions. On the one hand, the museum was needed, it was waiting for a long time, it turned out worthy. С другой — не совсем понятно, какое место он займет в нынешней политике памяти, которая совмещает такие противоречащие друг другу вещи, как концепция увековечения памяти репрессированных и уничтожение «Перми-36», создание национального музея ГУЛАГа и объявление «Мемориала» иностранным агентом. Еще непонятнее, что будет дальше. Не хотелось бы, чтобы московский музей оказался резервацией национальной памяти о ГУЛАГе и был использован в качестве предлога, чтобы закрыть или перепрофилировать остальные российские «места памяти» о советских политических репрессиях. В этом случае улыбаться точно не захочется.