Through a multitude of testimonies, the current exhibition at the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow (MAMM) pays homage to victims of the repressions of 1937, known as the “Great Terror,” which constitutes one of the bleakest pages in the history of the USSR.
The exhibition at MAMM features unique archival documents, some of which were declassified only in the last few years; newspapers; photographs; newsreels; interviews with former prisoners; artifacts from the life and daily routine of GULAG convicts: barbed wire, the doors and windows of cells for political prisoners, quilted jackets and footwear from prisoners who sometimes had to fasten pieces of old tires to sole their boots; letters and drawings by GULAG inmates that were subjected to harsh censorship; circulars regulating the censorship; the so-called “convoy letters,” notes written on whatever was available that prisoners miraculously managed to throw from the closed train cars in which they were transported to the camps…
One section of the exhibition is devoted to the Butovo firing range, the largest area for the mass shooting and burial of victims of Stalinist repressions in the Moscow Region. Today we know the names of 20,760 people who were killed there. They were shot between August 1937 and October 1938. Their names are recorded at the exhibition.
There is a slide projection of GULAG photographs and the full face and profile shots underline the fact that everyone, without exception, was mowed down by the machinery of repression, including great cultural figures, scientists, military leaders and statesmen, as well as those who actually organized and implemented the repressions.
The MAMM exhibition focuses on the fate of five heroes, outstanding figures in the realms of science, culture and the arts. Sergei Korolyov was one of the founders of cosmonautics, the chief designer of rocket and space technology and Soviet rocket-powered missiles. The launch of the first artificial earth satellite (1957), the flight of Yuri Gagarin (1961) and man’s first walk in outer space (the cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, 1965) were prepared and implemented under his leadership. Sergei Korolyov served his sentence in the Gulag from 1938 to 1944. He died during an operation from complications following anesthesia.
Next we encounter Pavel Florensky, an Orthodox priest, religious philosopher, scientist, and cultural historian, sentenced to death in 1937 by the special Leningrad ‘troika’ of the NKVD and executed; Vsevolod Meyerhold, an outstanding theatre director, actor, teacher, and drama theorist, arrested in 1939, and tortured before being executed in 1940; Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a writer, publicist, and a Nobel Prize winner (1970), deprived of Soviet citizenship and expelled from the USSR in 1974, who returned from exile in 1994.
Hommage aux victimes des répressions politiques
December 21 to March 18, 2018
Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow
16, rue Ostojenka
Moscou, Russie, 119034
