Our Mission
Our mission is to preserve personal testimonies, documents, photographs, artifacts, audiovisual materials, and family memories of state terror — and to make them accessible to future generations.
The history of state repression is often told through numbers: arrests, executions, deportations, prisons, camps, forced labor, confiscations, and displacement. But behind every number was an individual life — a person with a family, a profession, a home, hopes, beliefs, and memories. The Museum of State Terror exists to restore these individual lives to history.
Through personal stories, archival materials, oral histories, documentary film, exhibitions, research, and educational programs, we seek to preserve the voices of those who were persecuted, imprisoned, displaced, silenced, or killed by the state — as well as the memories carried by their children and grandchildren.
We are particularly committed to preserving testimony while witnesses and their families are still able to tell these stories. Letters kept for decades, photographs hidden in family albums, documents brought across borders, memories passed from parents to children, and interviews recorded today may become irreplaceable historical evidence tomorrow.
The Museum examines not only the victims of state terror, but also the mechanisms that make repression possible: the destruction of civil liberties, political persecution, censorship, propaganda, surveillance, forced displacement, the criminalization of dissent, and the transformation of institutions intended to protect society into instruments of fear and coercion.
Our current work has a strong focus on Soviet political repression and the GULAG system, drawing on personal testimony, archival research, documentary materials, and family histories. As the Museum develops, its scope will broaden to examine state terror in different countries and historical periods and to explore both the similarities and the differences between systems of political repression.
We believe that a museum of state terror must be more than a repository of the past. It should be a place where documents encounter living memory, where historical events are understood through individual experience, and where visitors are encouraged to ask how societies reach the point at which persecution becomes normalized.
For us, memory is not only about looking back. It is a way to understand the present.
By preserving evidence and individual testimony, we help ensure that crimes do not disappear along with their witnesses — and that people whose voices were once meant to be silenced remain part of our collective history.
