Russian historians have raised alarm over what they say is an attempt by the country’s authorities to wipe out records of Stalin-era purges, after a
Gulag history museum discovered a secret 2014 order instructing officials to destroy data on prisoners.
Up to 17 million people were sent to the Gulag, a notorious Soviet prison camp system, in the 1930s and 1940s, and at least 5 million of them were convicted on false testimony. The prison population in the sprawling labour camps peaked at 2 million.
On Friday, Moscow’s Gulag History Museum said that the directive it had unearthed ordered destruction of registration cards of prisoners who had reached the age of 80 — which now would include almost all of them.
Case files of Gulag prisoners have been destroyed in past but their personal data has been kept on registration cards, still held by police and intelligence officials and meant to be stored indefinitely.
The museum’s archive expert, Alexander Makeyev, told the Interfax agency they discovered that the cards had been destroyed in one region — the remote Magadan in the far east, home to some of the Soviet Union’s biggest, deadliest prison camps.
Repressions perpetrated under dictator
Joseph Stalin left a profound scar on the Russian nation, destroying lives and displacing millions. But in recent years, under President
Vladimir Putin, Russian officials have made efforts to play down Stalin’s terror, hailing the Soviet leader for building a new economy and helping the Soviets win World War II. The museum said that it has appealed to the Russian presidential human rights council to look into the classified order.
The report has caused an outrage in the Russian historical community and beyond.
Hundreds of Russians have appealed in recent months to the Gulag museum for help obtaining official information about grandmothers and grandfathers who were caught up in the notorious purges, museum director Roman Romanov told the Reuters news agency on Saturday.