The organizers of the exposition were guided by the thematic–chronological principle, their goal being to reconstruct a chronicle of the crimes of the Communist regime and to establish events and facts that can never be forgotten if Ukrainians aspire to build a civil society in Ukraine based on the principles of democracy and humanism.

The idea to create the exposition was initiated by the head of the Kyiv City Organization of the All Ukrainian Memorial Society of V. Stus, Roman Krutsyk, who planned the layout of the panels and the exposition’s overall design. The historian, professor, and head of the scholarly council of the Memorial Society, Dr. Yurii Shapoval, elab. orated the plans for the exposition, prepared the texts, selected documents and illustrated materials. Another member of the Memorial Society, the artist and designer Oleh Kravchenko, designed the exposition and was responsible for the computer design.

“The moral horror of the terror and its corrupting influence on peoples’ psyches lie not so much in individual killing or even in their numbers, but in the system itself.” These words, written by the researcher of totalitarianism Serhii Melhunov, echo the poetry of Vasyl Symonenko: “Billions of beliefs are buried in the black soil, billions of happinesses have been scattered into dust.” Martin Luther King characterized totalitarianism thus: “Injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere.” All these aphorisms, which serve as epigraphs to the exposition, expose the appalling system of terror that held sway over Ukraine for many decades. Its name is the Soviet Union.

The first and most convincing display in the exposition is a map that could not be published in Soviet times. It shows almost all the Camp Administrations of the 230 concentration camps that existed in the USSR. The map covers the territory of the entire Soviet Union and indicates the systems that were comprised of these camp administrations. Each administration contained between five and twenty concentration camps. In addition to the Camp Administrations listed and marked on the map, there were also many transit points, secret camps, special purpose isolators, ordinary prisons, so–called “central prisons,” and psychiatric hospitals.

In cooperation with the Moscow branch of the Memorial Society, the Kyiv City Organization of the All Ukrainian Memorial Society obtained a database of information on the system of punitive organs of the USSR. This body of information includes data on all of the prisons in every Ukrainian oblast, their administrators and the dates when these prisons were established. Facts pertaining to each camp in the GULAG system, the dates of its creation and closure, location, number of prisoners, the type of work that was performed by prisoners, and a name index of the administrative personnel of the Soviet Union’s repressive organs, with biographical sketches and photographs, was also included.

Visitors to the exposition will be struck by the fact that there were concentration camps whose prison population equaled the population of current oblast (provincial) centres in Ukraine, e.g., 250,000 and 268,000 (prisoners).

After the Second World War the number of prisoners increased significantly, owing mostly to the influx of Soviet prisoners of war, soldiers from General Vlasov’s “Army for the Liberation of the People of Russia”, fighters of the OUN—UPA, and people who were shipped off to work in Germany during the war years. According to documented facts, the number of prisoners in the GULAG was much higher than the number of Red Army troops. If one accepts the very conservative figures of Robert Conquest, who estimated the average number of prisoners in the camps in the early 1940s at eight million, then one may conclude that between one–fifth and one–tenth of the adult population of the USSR were in concentration camps and worked in conditions that guaranteed them a premature death. In view mass revolts in the camps greatly alarmed the Soviet leadership, which engaged in large of this qualitative and quantitative composition of prisoners, it is no wonder that the military operations, complete with armoured units and front–line bombing by the air force, against these unarmed prisoners.

A significant part of the GULAG prison population consisted of Ukrainians. In a document stamped “Top Secret,” the Commission of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, which operated in the Richnyi concentration camp in the Vorkuta region where, after a revolt was suppressed in this camp, listed prisoners according to the following political designations: (from the the original)