Moscow’s Gulag museum forced Russians to confront their own history. The Kremlin has decided that era is over. A new ‘Museum of Memory’ has one villain: the Nazis.

Russia is turning one of its last major spaces for confronting Soviet-era repression into a showcase for state-sanctioned patriotism. The Gulag History Museum in Moscow — long a rare institutional refuge for the memory of Stalin’s victims — is becoming a “Museum of Memory” dedicated to what the Kremlin calls the “genocide of the Soviet people” at the hands of Nazi Germany. The transformation encapsulates a broader Kremlin project: not the suppression of historical memory, but its replacement ...