Today I went to the Sakharov museum with Elizabeth, who is researching in Perm but was in Moscow for the week. The museum is small but the sort of place you could return to and learn new things each time. It has two aisles, though it looked like they were putting up another exhibit in the same room. The first aisle has one wall with images of the bright, idealized world that the state promoted and opposite this are collections of images and papers showing the darker realities that occurred simultaneously. The second aisle is a tour through Gulag-related quotes, documents, and photos. There are binders full of actual profiles of people sent to Gulgags that you can take to a nearby chair and pour over. Throughout there are also anecdotes. One that stuck with me went roughly this way:

Lecturer—The Soviet constitution guarantees freedom of speech...

Student—Excuse me, what about freedom after that speech is delivered, is it also guaranteed?

One of the fixtures at museums here is an army of older women who sit on chairs scattered throughout all museums and keep people in line with their mere presence (a task they often accomplish even while sleeping). I think of them as the Museum Babushki. Usually they don’t interact with visitors unless someone takes a flash photo. Well, after we had spent quite a while perusing the museum, a Museum Babushka came up to us and, after speaking to us just long enough to learn we understood Russian, launched into a long speech about how to view the exhibit with long descriptions and explanations, some of which was redundant but most of which was very interesting. She was a fountain of information and it would have been great to listen to her for hours—which could have been accomplished by only an occasional nod on our end of the conversation—but after perhaps forty-five minutes, we had to leave to get Elizabeth to the train station.