What Russian people are experiencing today is a conflict of memories of the shared past. The polarization within the society has risen to the extent that the critical approach to the past becomes an insult: one of the recent legislative initiatives in Russian Parliament is to criminalize “insulting patriotic feelings”. The problem of “misinterpretation of history” is used in political rhetoric on such level as “history as a science should serve the national interests of Russia” (as it stated in the thesis of the Russian minister of Culture, Vladimir Medinsky). The most recent Russian cultural policy includes the reconsideration of the 20th century’s history with all its paradoxes that cause heated public discussions. Such exhibitions as “The Orthodox Russia. From the Great Upheavals to the Great Victory” (Moscow Manege, November 2015; on this exhibition Soviet leaders were presented alongside Orthodox clergymen in one heroic narrative, ignoring the fact that the former gave orders to put the latter to death) could serve as illustrations of this process as well as civic initiatives such as “The Last Address” (a Russian analogue of the German Stolperstein project to commemorate the victims of political repressions). In the modern multicultural world, the preservation and dialogue of different identities is a highly significant question. The cultural institutions are historically located on the forefront of the national identity construction and specific role in this process belongs to museums. By studying the controversies in contemporary cultural narratives of Russian museums and the deliberate cultural insulation as a national policy, I intend to contribute to developing a new language for museums to encompass both global and local identities.