The building in which the museum is located was built in Tomsk in 1896 according to the project of a parochial-church school by the architect V.Khabarov. During World War I there was a military hospital here, and from 1923 to 1944 it turned into the remand prison of the Tomsk City Department of the NKVD. After World War II the premises of the former prison were given over to communal apartments, whose residents, for decades, naturally tried to erase any traces of the prison.

In 1989 owing to Memorial International society the first museum in the USSR of victims and history of mass political repressions was opened in Tomsk. For over thirty years the museum took up part of the basement compartments of the building, where earlier, during the years of Stalin's repressions, the NKVD remand prison was located.

It was clear that the museum needed to expand. By 2019, it had acquired new spaces – the remaining premises in the basement of the building were purchased by the Memory Fund, and in 2020, the global reconstruction of the museum began.

01 - Hall - 24,87 m²

02 - Vestibule / Ticket office / Cloakroom - 62,90 m²

03 - Accessible bathroom - 5,39 m²

04 - Cafe - 38,35 m²

05 - Temporary exhibitions hall - 56,30 m²

06 - Corridor - 38,52 m²

07 - Cell №1 (expo hall) - 11,04 m²

08 - Cell №2 (expo hall) - 11,04 m²

09 - Cell №3 (expo hall) - 11,49 m²

10 - Cell №4 (expo hall) - 8,95 m²

11 - Cell №5 (expo hall) - 9,75 m²

12 - Cell №6 (expo hall) - 9,75 m²

13 - Cell №7 (expo hall) - 11,4 m²

14 - Cell №8 (expo hall) - 11,4 m²

15 - Cell №9 (expo hall) - 10,7 m²

16 - Document centre - 34,62 m²

17 - Tambour - 7,83 m²

18 - Technical room - 11,40 m²  

19 - Museum administration - 24,72 m²

20 - Ventilation chamber - 9,97 m²

21 - Technical room - 4,81 m²

Total area of ​​the basement floor - 415,2 m²

22  - Hall - 11,17 m²

23 -  Bathroom - 1,43 m²

24 -  Bathroom - 1,43 m²

25 -  Bathroom - 1,43 m²

26 -  Bathroom - 1,43 m²

27 - Utility room - 7,82 m²

Total area -1 floor - 24,83 m²

The permanent exhibition, which can be explored both with a guide and independently, takes place in a series of tight narrow prison cells, separated from a long corridor by authentic prison doors from various penitentiary institutions of the Tomsk region. The visitor makes his way through nine chambers, each of which is dedicated to one of the aspects of political repressions in the Tomsk region. The walls of the cells are membrane-partitions, main carriers of information. After all, on the one hand, the wall is an instrument of communication between the "cellmates", on the other hand it is an insurmountable barrier. This is why display cases, interactive exhibits and monitors are integrated into the body of the inter-chamber partitions, both newly constructed and historical, and the space of the exhibition halls-cells remains empty.

The museum conducts extensive educational work. The temporary exhibition hall hosts not only exhibitions, but also a diverse interdisciplinary event program: lectures, film screenings, and performances. Conferences and discussions are held in the document centre, where interviews are recorded and memories are collected for the Visual Anthropology Center and the museum fund.

Over 120 years, both the functionality and the interior of the building have been changed many times. Each rearrangement ended up leaving a scar or trace of varying depth on it. We have tried to preserve all the artefacts we found, museumificating them and turning them into part of the museum interior. For us, both the hooks from prison bunks found under a layer of plaster and traces of tile adhesive from the renovation of the 1990s / 2000s are equally valuable and important.