A Journey to the Gulag: Experiencing History Through Virtual Reality

Title: A Journey to the Gulag: Experiencing History Through Virtual Reality This event is sponsored by IWP’s Intermarium Lecture Series. To learn more about A Journey to the Gulag please visit Gulag.cz. About the Lecture: Around 20 million people went through the horrors of Soviet labor camps. At least 1.6 million of them died. Among the victims of Soviet repression were also people from European countries and the U.S. Currently, with the exception of the former Perm-36 project, there aren’t any museums in Russia of former Gulag camps from Stalin’s era. However, hundreds of abandoned camps are still hidden away in the Siberian taiga. A small group of enthusiasts visit and document these sites to virtually preserve them to make them accessible to the public through virtual and augmented reality. Štěpán Černoušek will speak about the project documenting the Gulag camps and creating VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) experiences for the unique online Gulag museum. About the Speaker: Štěpán Černoušek is the head of the Virtual Museum Gulag.Online and Chairman of the Gulag.cz Association. Mr. Černoušek regularly visited Chechnya from 2007 to 2010 and created a section of recorded testimonies with Chechen witnesses. In 2013 and 2014, he extended this activity to witnesses from Georgia, Armenia, and North Ossetia. In 2009, 2011, 2013, and 2016, he organized four expeditions to abandoned Gulag camps in Siberia. The result is a virtual museum, Gulag Online, and projects in virtual and augmented reality. In 2016, he established the Russian Memorial Society’s branch office in the Czech Republic. Mr. Černoušek was elected to the Board of the central International Memorial organization in 2018. He is currently on Fulbright scholarship in the U.S., invited by The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience.