This article examines three Russian museum exhibitions that either wholly or partly address the Gulag and the post-Stalin Soviet repressive system: The "Russia - My History" historical park (Moscow), the Gulag History Museum (Moscow) and the Perm-36 Memorial Complex of Political Repressions (Kuchino, Permsky Krai). The authors focus on the parts of the exhibitions that explain the character and form of prisoners' labor. They demonstrate that in contemporary Russia, there has been a noticeable increase in representation of forced labor as 'productive work for the good of the nation,' which strongly recalls the early Soviet representation of prisoners' labor as part of the Soviet building of socialism. The authors demonstrate that images of 'socialist labor' in Rus sian exhibitions about the Gulag are gradually displacing images that refer to slavery.

Memory studies Repressions Labor in prison museums

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