Gulag Museum
The State Museum of GULAG is devoted to one of the most miserable times in our history. GULAG is the acronym for the Russian translation of ‘Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies’ but nowadays this word – Gulag – has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself. The tour of the museum starts in front of the map showing the Gulag camps; the scale of the political repression in the USSR is startling. About 14 million people passed through the "labor camps", with millions killed by the brutal policy of the Soviet regime. The various halls house documentary archives and personal belongings of witnesses that lived through the hell of the political repressions. Documents, letters and memoirs of the former inmates tell the story of the creation of the first concentration camps in 1918, the formation of the Gulag in the 1930s, the tightening of the purges in 1937, the eviction of the Volga Germans and further mass deportation of peoples in 1943-44.
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