Officially, the closure was announced amid alleged violations of fire safety rules, but it comes amid an intense Kremlin campaign against independent civil society and those who question the state's interpretation of history.
"As a result of the inspection of the museum, fire safety violations were found," the museum said.
It removed the content from its website, replacing it with a message about the "temporary" closure.
Established in 2001, the central Moscow museum combines official government documents with family photos and items of Gulag victims.
The Gulag was a vast network of labour camps set up in the Soviet Union.
Millions of alleged traitors and enemies of the state were sent there, many to their deaths, in what historians describe as a period of mass political repression.
In 2021. The Council of Europe awarded the site its museum prize, saying it works to "uncover history and activate memory in order to strengthen the resilience of civil society and its resistance to political repression and human rights violations today and in the future."
In his 24 years in power, President Vladimir Putin has sought to revise Russia's historical narrative and its relationship with the Soviet Union.
While he sometimes condemns the enormous repression under Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, Putin more often praises him as a great military leader.
School textbooks pay little attention to the millions of victims of the Great Terror, who are seen as embarrassing in presenting the Soviet Union as a great power that defeated Nazi Germany.
The authorities are increasingly targeting individuals and groups who oppose this approach, a campaign that intensified during the offensive in Ukraine.
In 2021, the authorities ordered the liquidation of Memorial, a Nobel Prize-winning NGO that registered victims of both Soviet repression and alleged human rights abuses by the current regime.
Last month, the Gulag History Museum organised the "Return of the Names" event - where individuals read out the names of people killed during the Soviet terror. | BGNES
