The KGB Museum

In Tallinn, almost everyone’s heard of the KGB Museum, its history, and the moment when everything took a darker turn. As with many places like these, it all began rather unremarkably. The building on Pagari Street originally served as a meeting place for the Estonian Provisional Government, after the country’s declaration of independence in 1918. It was a hopeful beginning, full of promise. But that all changed in the 1940s, when the Soviet Union occupied Estonia. From then on, this building became a place of fear and suffering. The KGB, the Soviet Union’s infamous intelligence agency, took over the site and turned it into a headquarters for surveillance, interrogation and rooting out suspected spies among the population. More than 10,000 people were deported to Siberia in 1941, followed by a further 20,000 in just a few days between March 25th and 29th, 1949. The somewhat “luckier” ones were thrown into the building’s prison, which remained in use until 1959. This dark and tragic chapter is now documented and explored in this thought-provoking museum, open to the public since 2017.