Victims of ALZHIR – remembering and honoring
This week SHSS hosted an exhibit “Remembering and honoring” from the “ALZHIR” Museum.
The “ALZHIR” Museum is a memorial complex dedicated to the victims of political repressions and Stalin’s totalitarianism that was opened in 2007. It is located in the village near Astana, where the Akmola prison camp for wives of traitors of Motherland began operating exactly 80 years ago, thus, opening a tragic history in the history of Soviet Kazakhstan.
The exhibit features 10 posters, which tell harrowing stories of innocent women who had perished in the camp. The exhibit continues cooperation between the “ALZHIR” Museum and the SHSS. In the past, SSRES students visited the museum. And last October, the MAPSIR alumni Raikhan Satymbekova and the museum curator Anara Khassenova made presentations about the memory of the “ALZHIR” victims of Stalin’s terror.
Both SHSS and the “ALZHIR” museum are taking part in the research project – funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) – on Gulag memory and attitudes to punishment in the present day in collaboration with the University of Glasgow and Strathclyde University (Scotland).
