A new cultural center dedicated to the victims of the Soviet labor camps and prisons for those with “wrong” political views will open in Moscow. The initiative has come from the capital's officials.

      There is already a small (300 square meters) Gulag History Museum in central Moscow, which was founded by historian Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, the victim and witness of Stalin’s repressions, in 2001. This museum has long-remained the only museum of its kind in Russia. There is a lot of photographs, letters, diaries, documents and art works of those people who went through the labor camps. However, 300 square meters of space are to small for such a big and painful chapter of Russian history, which touched almost every Russian family.

      Now Moscow officials plan to allocate a 3,000 square meters venue for the new museum. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Natalya, is set as the new museum's curator. The Nobel Prize winner, writer and historian Alexandr Solzhenitsyn is most known for his works dedicated to the Gulag. His famous literary creation "The GULag Archipelago", which took him 10 years to write, is based on Solzhenitsyn’s personal experience.

      GULag is the acronym for Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies (Glavnoye Upravlyeniye Ispravityelno-Trudovikh Lagyeryey i Koloniy) of the NKVD, the government agency that administered Soviet system of prisons and labor camps in 1934-1960.

Sources: RIA Novosti Russia Today Image: Outwest

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