According to International Business Times, the Russian Ministry of Culture is supporting the construction of a museum in Kolyma, in northeastern Russia. The title of the article, published on May 17, 2010, was "Museum of Stalinist Gulag labor camps to open in Russia's Far East." The open-air museum will be "a replica of a soviet labor camp, complete with watchtowers, barracks, isolation wards and barbed wire. Visitors will be able to see personal items belonging to the prisoners, their letters and works art."
The museum, to be built next year, will cover an area of three hectares in the village of Yagodnoye, some eight hours by car from the regional capital of Magadan (where the airport is located). There were dozens of concentration camps in this area. My father died in one of them, as described in Chapter 1 of my autobiography:
I was pleased to read that the project is government-supported. It shows that Medvediev and Putin are serious in denouncing Stalinism. The project will probably have a positive economic effect on the Kolyma region, provided transportation facilities and hotels are made available for tourists. A museum in Yagodnye can become as important as the Polish museum in Auschwitz.
