In 1996, he returned with other fellow inmates and established a private museum. The museum's staff were labeled "foreign agents" and the museum was forcibly taken over by Russian government when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. All mention of Stalin was erased, exhibitions about crimes against humanity and the fight for human rights were revamped in favor of a more "balanced" approach:
"We don't want to take sides," the museum's new head of exhibitions, Yelena Mamayeva, said shortly after being appointed. "We're trying to talk more about the architectural complex [of the camp], and not to get involved in assessing specific people who served sentences there, and assessing Stalin, and so on. Because right now this is not quite politically correct."
Instead of warning future generations about the dangers of totalitarianism, the museum now celebrates timber output of the camp and tries to present forced singing of songs praising the government that brutalized them as a rich cultural program offered to the inmates.