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.