Yelena V Litvinov and Tatyana Margolin, When Cultural Institutions Are Targeted: Global Lessons for Resilience, American Alliance of Museums, 2 December 2025
While we can’t predict the future, we can explore ways it may unfold by looking at the world around us. As author William Gibson observed, “the future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed,” and I’ve been in search of “case studies of the futures” that might illuminate challenges facing U.S. museums in coming years. Today on the blog, Yelena Litvinov and Tatyana Margolin, co-founders of STROIKA, an organization building the resilience of anti-authoritarian movements globally, share some observations on what we can learn from cultural organizations in other countries that are navigating government pressure to align with one official version of history.
Yours from the future,
Elizabeth Merritt
Vice President, Strategic Foresight and Founding Director
Center for the Future of Museums, American Alliance of Museums.
A Cautionary Tale
There is a storied and celebrated non-profit organization in Russia called Memorial. Over the years, its staff and volunteers painstakingly built an extraordinary archive of oral histories, letters, and journals — a uniquely important record of the unimaginable atrocities that took place within the vast system of forced labor camps known as Stalin’s Gulag. Founded in 1989, as the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of dissolution, Memorial became the country’s first human rights group.
Read more: Museums in Crisis: How the World’s Institutions Are Bracing for What’s Next