The Tomsk Memorial Museum "Investigative Prison of the NKVD" is located in the basement of a building that housed the internal prison of the Tomsk City Department of the OGPU-NKVD from 1923 to 1944. The adjacent area served as the prison's inner courtyard, and now it is home to the Memory Square. In 1992 and 2011, monuments were erected here to the victims of Bolshevik terror on Tomsk land and commemorative plaques for the repressed Kalmyks, Poles, Estonians, and Latvians.

The museum's exhibits allow visitors to familiarize themselves with original documents and their copies related to investigations and interrogations. The collection includes embroidery, maps, and crafts made in prisons and in exile.

Visitors can imagine what it was like for the prisoners while walking through the reconstructed corridors. They can also peek into the cell for detainees and the investigator's office where interrogations took place.

In four halls of the museum, former cells, there are sections of the permanent exhibition, such as "Chronicle of Repressions in Tomsk Land," "The Great Terror," "Execution Cross," "Bialystok Tragedy," "ChSIRs," "Their Tragic Fates," "Fate of the Priest," "Kolpashovo Pit," "GULAG and Special Settlers of the Narym Region," and the "Underground Execution Corridor," decorated with the sculptural composition "Departing into Oblivion," as well as personal stands with biographical materials and documents of those executed in Tomsk.

The first honorary guest of the museum was writer and Nobel Prize laureate A.I. Solzhenitsyn, who visited Tomsk in 1994 while returning home from exile. The first exhibition opened in 1995.

The Memorial Museum "Investigative Prison of the NKVD" has an exhibition hall for temporary exhibitions, film screenings, and meetings with the public. The museum has a rich media archive containing information about 200,000 people. These stories mainly concern dekulakization, deportations, executions, exiles, and forced labor.

The museum also has a library, and video and photo archives are being formed, along with a collection of archival documents and publications in periodicals, allowing visitors and researchers to delve deeper into some tragic periods of Russian history.