The Kolyma authorities decided to close the memorial room of Shalamov

The authorities of Kolyma decided to close the memorial room of the writer Varlam Shalamov in Debyn village. She is located in a local hospital. This was reported by historian and local historian Ivan Jukha.

Dzhukha appealed to Ivan Gorbachev, the head of the Ministry of Health of the Magadan region, with a request to preserve the exposition, which had been collected for 20 years. According to him, the museum has become “an obligatory point in the routes of tourists traveling to Kolyma”, and the exhibition is “one of the ways to overcome stereotypes about the region, which is associated only with camps”.

According to Dzhukha, the museum was created exclusively by enthusiasts on the donations of tens of residents of different regions of Russia. They collected rare exhibits, according to the local expert, for 20 years.

The local mayor complained that the village hospital would be closed in any case and offered to move the exposition to any other building.

• In recent years, there has been a struggle in Russian regions with memorial objects connected with the history of Soviet repression. Memorial stones and crosses are destroyed and desecrated, tablets are torn off. For example, in Yakutia, the authorities dismantled a monument to repressed and exiled Poles, in Irkutsk region they sawed down a cross to repressed Lithuanians, and in Tomsk region, unknown persons stole plaques with the names of Polish victims of Soviet repressions in the 1930s and destroyed the cross.
• Varlam Shalamov is a Soviet writer, the author of “Kolymskih raskassov”, which tells about the life of prisoners in Soviet correctional labor camps in the 1930s and 1950s. Shalamov himself was repressed and spent a total of sixteen years in the Kolyma camps.