Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives

Abstract

The website Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives presented the history of the gulag system as a browseable archive of videos, art, artifacts, photographs, and life stories of former Gulag prisoners. It featured thematic exhibitions, including a virtual tour of the reconstructed camp and museum made possible by the Gulag Museum at Perm-36. There were also teaching resources for introducing the Gulag's history into middle and high school classrooms. The project originated in a collaboration between Steven Barnes, CHNM, and the National Park Service. The content now at gulaghistory.org/nps was an online version of a traveling exhibit GULAG: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom, which was developed by the National Park Service, Amnesty International USA, the Gulag Museum in Perm, Russia, and the International Memorial Society. The exhibit opened in 2006 and was on view through 2008. The NPS exhibit website was made possible through a Teaching Across the Curriculum Grant awarded to Dr. Barnes by George Mason University Dr. Barnes worked with partners at the Gulag Museum at Perm 36 (2004-2014) to secure funding from to make a web exhibit about the experiences of the prisoners of the Gulag, and to hold a conference on the topic. The conference was held at the Davis Center at Harvard University and funded by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The teaching materials on the site were created by the Davis Center at Harvard University. The devblog subdomain (gulaghistory.org/devblog), preserved here, was a Moveable Type site used by the project team between 2004 and 2005 while working on a prototype site for a grant application to the National Endowment for the Humanities (gulaghistory.org/neh). The grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities allowed them to build the main site, which utilized an early version of the Omeka software. Barnes started a podcast to highlight new scholarship on Soviet and Russian history during the period of the Gulag (gulaghistory.org/podcast), but only two episodes were released.