The long shadow of the Gulag:

A planned museum devoted to the Stalinist labour camps is opening old wounds

Nearly 50 years after Stalin's death brought the worst of the Soviet Union's labour camp system to an end, plans to open a national museum dedicated to the darkest period of 20th-century Russian history are reopening painful wounds.

The Gulag Museum, containing archives and artefacts highlighting the plight of the millions who suffered and died under communist totalitarianism, is due to open next autumn in the centre of Moscow.

"We need not just a monument but a living exhibition so younger generations can see history with their own eyes and attempt to create a different society without nihilism or cynicism," says Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, the 81-year-old amateur historian and instigator of the project, who himself spent 13 years in labour camps.

But the proposal has attracted controversy in a country still struggling to come to terms with its past. Some question its desirability. Others ask why no such institution has been created before - the attempted putsch that triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union happened 10 years ago.

"The absence of a national Gulag museum is inevitable, because unfortunately contemporary Russian society does not view its own history in the way that the Germans did after the second world war," says Yuri Pivovarov, director of the Institute of Social Science Research at the Russian Academy of Sciences. "People do not equate the ethical and moral horrors and shame of Nazism with those of communism."

He argues that a first wave of changing postwar attitudes in Germany was imposed by Allied forces and supported by the Catholic Church and by rapid economic growth. In Russia, by contrast, the Orthodox Church was a marginalised and compromised force. The collapse of communism in the 1990s, which brought a sharp deterioration in living standards for most people, replaced disillusionment with the past with a romanticised memory of its better aspects.

"The number of Russians who think the repression was good is very small but people also remember positive things: the winning of the war and the battle for space exploration," says Igor Klyamkin, an academic. "Most older people take Stalinism into account and remember it for better or for worse but just prefer not to think about it."

Such ambivalence can be found in even greater measure among Russia's political elite. "The majority of so-called democrats prefer not to change anything because, in their sub-conscious, they recognise that they were all active in one way or another in the old regime," says Andrei Zubov, a cultural historian.

President Vladimir Putin, a career KGB officer, has, for example, reinstated an only slightly modified Stalin-era national anthem. He has continued to award Red Star military medals and allowed the use of "comrade" as a form of address. These actions, condemned by intellectuals, appear to reflect Mr Putin's desire to unite the country and avoid inflaming the deep scars that Russian society still bears.

Mr Antonov-Ovseyenko's Gulag Museum represents an attempt to fill the void created by the absence of political leadership and the ambivalence of ordinary people, as well as to lessen the dissent among other cash-strapped groups concerned with the evils of the communist past.

Memorial, the human rights organisation founded by the scientist Andrei Sakharov, has amassed a substantial archive and has a modest exhibition space in its cramped Moscow headquarters. But Arseny Roginsky, its director, stresses that any new museum should not draw too sharp a distinction between the "evil past and the good present", pointing out that many Soviet archives have been inaccessible to researchers over the past few years; that human rights abuses continue today; and that many people deported under Stalin are still unable to return home.

Yuri Samodurov, head of Moscow's Sakharov Centre, which also has a small permanent exhibit on the repression, also fears that Mr Antonov-Ovseyenko's project risks being hijacked by vested interests, including the City of Moscow, which has allocated a building and funds to the museum.

Certainly, the budget of Rbs60m (Dollars 2m) and timetable of one year to the opening appear extremely optimistic, while Mr Antonov-Ovseyenko's determination to run the museum himself in spite of his frailty may pose difficulties in the future.

In spite of the tensions, Andrei Zubov argues that - in the same way that inter-generational clashes in Germany in the 1960s helped the country to confront its Nazi past - "this new generation doesn't accept the arguments of fathers and grandfathers. I hope that in 10 or 15 years, Russian society will be able to understand this terrible communist regime in all its scale."