Prague, June 9 (CTK) – Czech historians launched a Gulag Online virtual museum on the Internet yesterday, the first project in the world that maps and documents the former Soviet Union’s abandoned labour camps by means of 3D animation and that is available in a Czech, English and Russian versions.
It enables the visitors to imagine how the system of repression functioned in the Soviet Union.
The online “tours” of gulags are complemented with the life stories of Czechs and Slovaks persecuted there, and documents and photographs that experts from the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (USTR) have gathered within the Czechoslovaks in Gulag research project since 2008.
Before the gulag museum was launched, the authors made several expeditions to Siberia to see the remnants of local labour camps from the 1950s.
The website offers satellite snaps, maps and documents, as well as panoramic photographs of the present state of the camps and 3D models of items of everyday life, diaries, letter, and photos of inmates from the criminal files kept by the Soviet secret police NKVD.
“About 25,000 Czechoslovak citizens and members of Czech communities were persecuted in the Soviet Union from the bolshevik revolution in 1917 to the end of the 1960s. The tragic fates of most of them still remain unknown not only to the public but even to their closest relatives. This was the main motive for us to launch our research in 2008,” historian Jan Dvorak said.
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