"Domain Free": The website for the NKVD Investigative Prison Museum in Tomsk has stopped working.
The website of the NKVD Investigative Prison Museum in Tomsk, which housed records of nearly 200 repressed individuals, has stopped working. The museum reported maintenance, but the archive is no longer available on the new website.
В Tomsk The old website of the memorial museum "NKVD Investigative Prison," which had collected a huge amount of data on Soviet terror, has stopped working. The site contained information on almost 200 thousand repressed in Tomsk region — dispossessed peasants, special settlers, and those tried by the "troikas." Along with lists of names, it contained thousands of documents, camp memoirs, and family chronicles sent by the children and grandchildren of the repressed.
NKVD Investigative Prison: What's Seen Instead of an Archive
Now when I try to open the site, a message appears saying that domain nkvd.tomsk.ru free".
The museum's new website has not replaced the archive.
The museum also has a new, modern website, but it doesn't contain any archives. It was launched back in 2022 after a major renovation of the institution, carried out by the Memory Foundation with the participation of the Gulag History Museum. The website functions more like a showcase—it only publishes exhibition listings, tour schedules, and sells tickets.
Museum version: technical work
Officially, neither the museum's management, which is now headed by a former FSB officer, Valery Uimanov, Neither local officials have commented on the archive shutdown. The museum itself reported that the website stopped working on October 29, the eve of Remembrance Day for the Victims of Political Repression, allegedly due to maintenance.
"The old site will likely no longer be operational. It's still unknown whether the archive will appear on the new site." — the museum staff admitted.
The electronic database was compiled over decades by Tomsk researchers and activists from the Memorial Society, including one of the initiators of the museum's creation in 1989. Vasily Khanevich. Khanevich headed the institution from 2002 to 2019, and then remained a senior research fellow. On March 1, 2025, Valery Khanevich was forced to resign.
