KarLag - Museum of Political Victims’ Memory of the Dolinka Settlement in Karaganda, Kazakhstan
The Karlag Museum occupies all three floors (two above ground plus the basement) of the enormous Dolinka headquarters with no fewer than thirty halls and exhibitions. The museum is a combination of traditional museum practice with the experiential museum so much in vogue today. The first floor features a series of exhibit rooms devoted to topics like the early 1930s famine in Kazakhstan, the political repression of the Kazakh intelligentsia, the foundation of Karlag, the economic activity of Karlag, repressed artists, women and children in Karlag, deportations of peoples to Kazakhstan, repressions of the post-Stalin years, and post-Soviet Kazakhstan as an independent state. These exhibit halls, in what I would call the traditional part of the Karlag Museum, are mostly dominated by a series of glass display cases holding historical photographs, artifacts, and text blocks explaining the history of Soviet repression in general and the Karlag labor camp in particular.Descending to the basement level, the museum takes a turn toward the experiential. Of course, basements have long held a morbid place in tales of Soviet citizen encounters with the secret police. Basements, like that of the notorious Lubianka in Moscow, were places of imprisonment, torture, and all too often execution. The Karlag Museum pulls out all the stops to capitalize on that mental imagery of the NKVD basement, even though the tour guides admit that they have no particular information that individuals were ever held, interrogated, or tortured in the basement of the Dolinka headquarters.
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