Memorial Museum 'NKVD Investigation Prison'

About museum

Memorial Museum 'NKVD Investigation Prison' — the country's first museum dedicated to the history of mass repressions in the USSR; it was founded in 1989. The museum is located in the basement of the building that housed the internal prison of the Tomsk City Department of the OGPU–NKVD from 1923 to 1944.

In 2022, the Memory Fund, with the participation of the Gulag History Museum and the M. B. Shatilov Tomsk Regional Museum of Local Lore, carried out a large-scale reconstruction of the museum.

The new permanent exhibition is located in the museum's memorial zone, where the dimensions of nine former prison cells have been recreated.

Special attention is paid to the legacy of the repressions on the territory of present-day Tomsk Oblast.

The museum also operates a Documentation Center where visitors can receive assistance in searching for information about repressed relatives. The museum maintains an electronic database of almost 200,000 people who passed through Tomsk Oblast during the years of Soviet rule.

The exhibition hall hosts temporary exhibitions, presentations, film screenings, meetings of local historians and researchers, and events with students and residents of Tomsk.