Oleg Chirkunov

Despite this history, Chirkunov left a mark as a reform-minded governor of Perm. He commissioned Marat Gelman, a prominent political scientist and art curator, to oversee "Project Perm" and revitalize the city to become a European center of culture.[3] Gelman aspired to create an "artistic perestroika."[4]

Perm, a city of brutal Soviet architecture and home to just under a million people, became an anomalous and relatively free political space under Chirkunov. While the Kremlin crushed opposition parties and independent media, "in Perm artists were encouraged to experiment, journalists could criticize, and visitors might think they were in Western Europe, rather than middle Russia."[4] Project Perm included a Museum of Contemporary Art; the White Nights Festival, a summer event which drew up to a million visitors; and the Perm-36 gulag museum, the only museum of the Soviet gulag experience and its terror, run by its former prisoners.[4]

After Putin's re-election in 2012 amid widespread protests, the Russian state cracked down heavily on political dissent as well as the sponsorship of independent artistic expression such as that in Perm. Chirkunov resigned as Perm governor in April 2012, after suffering constant verbal attacks on state television.[5]