Inaugurated on Friday 8 November at the SMS municipal library, the exhibition "Gulag: history and images of Stalin's lagers ’ will be open to the public free of charge until 29 November. The exhibition is organised by the Culture Department of the Municipality of Pisa to celebrate Freedom Day, established in 2005 by the Italian Parliament to commemorate the demolition of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989.
The exhibition, curated by the Memorial-Italia Association, kicked off with a public meeting entitled ‘Yesterday's Walls and Today's Walls: from the Gulag to the Laogai’, attended by Elena Dundovich (lecturer in History of International Relations at the University of Pisa), Ettore Cinnella (historian at the University of Pisa) and Marco Respinti (editor of the online periodical BitterWinter.org). The meeting was introduced by the Councillor for Culture of the Municipality of Pisa, Filippo Bedini, and moderated by Andrea Bartelloni (contributor to ‘Toscana Oggi’).
The Exhibition. The exhibition documents the history of the Soviet concentrationary system illustrated through documentary and photographic material from Soviet archives and describes some of the main ‘islands’ of what after A. Solženicyn has come to be known as the ‘Gulag Archipelago’: the Solovki islands, the construction site of the White Sea-Baltic Sea canal (Belomorkanal), the Bajkal-Amur railway, the Vorkuta mining area and Kolyma, an immense area of lagers and gold and tin mines in the far north-east of the Soviet Union, with an extremely harsh climate, made sadly famous by the stories of Varlam Šalamov.
The ‘official’ photographic material, taken to document what Soviet propaganda saw as a great work of re-education through labour, shows the buildings in which the prisoners were housed, their daily life and work. Some panels are devoted to particular aspects of lager life, such as the activities of the cultural and artistic sections, propaganda, and women's work, while others illustrate important moments in Soviet history such as the great trials or collectivisation. There is also a map of the Gulag system and graphs with statistical data.
One part of the exhibition is dedicated to the stories of some of those Italians who ended up being crushed by the Stalinist repressive machine: mainly anti-fascists who had emigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1920s-1930s to escape political persecution and to contribute to the building of a more just society. During the Great Terror of 1937-38, they were arrested, convicted of espionage, sabotage or counter-revolutionary activity: some were shot, others served long sentences in concentration camps.
Info: smsbiblio@comune.pisa.it; +39 050 8669200
Free entrance
Hours: Monday-Saturday 9 a.m.-7 p.m.; Sunday closed
