The Gulag barracks
A full-size reconstruction you enter.
Nenea hartia — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Pudelek (Marcin Szala) — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Pudelek (Marcin Szala) — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Saeima — CC BY-SA 2.0
The museum gives the whole story in order and is the right first visit; the Corner House is an experience of place (the KGB's own cells) and completes the picture afterwards — the same institution runs both.
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A black box on a square in the heart of Riga: the museum occupies a building raised in 1971 as a museum to the Soviet Latvian Red Riflemen — and after independence became a museum documenting what its builders did, an irony known to everyone who passes it. The display covers three successive occupations: Soviet 1940-1941, Nazi 1941-1944, Soviet 1944-1991 — through documents, photographs, objects and testimony, with a large section on the deportations to Siberia (some sixty thousand Latvians in the waves of 1941 and 1949). At its centre stands a full-size reconstruction of a Gulag barracks in Siberia, which you enter and stand inside. The building was renewed and reopened in 2022 with a new annexe by the Latvian-American architect Gunārs Birkerts, and it also runs the Corner House, the KGB headquarters, as a branch. The museum is fully translated and free to under-eighteens.
A full-size reconstruction you enter.
1941 and 1949 — some sixty thousand Latvians.
Latviešu strēlnieku laukums 1, Riga