GULAG HISTORY MUSEUM.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: MUSEUM

The Gulag History Museum, located just outside the Garden Ring Road in Moscow, somberly memorializes the 15 million to 18 million Soviet citizens imprisoned and 1.5 million murdered by the communist regime in the vast system of forced labor camps known as the gulag. Gulag is a Russian acronym for Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies. The system's 300 prisons and 1,700 prison colonies were closed only after dictator Josef Stalin's death in 1953.

The now-defunct Soviet Union would certainly never have allowed the creation of a museum as "a center for studying, comprehending, and openly discussing the history of mass repression in the USSR." For visitors, a collection of battered iron and wooden cell doors powerfully evokes the brutality of communism. Other artifacts include the...