This Mask of Sorrow, in Russian Маска скорби, was designed to commemorate the people in the Gulag prison camps in the Kolyma region of the Soviet Union who lost their lives under harsh conditions during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Ernest Neizvestny (whose parents were exiled to the camps) created the stark, brutalist, concrete design; the monument was constructed was Kamil Kazaev, and it was unveiled in 1996. It is 15 meters high. Funding was from the Russian government and seven cities in the region.
It consists of a large face that is shedding a tear from the left eye. The tear is made up of little human faces while the right eye with its barred window looks like it is bandaged. Behind the face, there is a statue of a crying woman in an indent. The indent resembles a Stalin-era prison cell, and above the woman, there is a headless man on a Cross. Below the Mask of Sorrow, there are stone markers bearing the names of the prison camps in the Kolyma, notorious for its Gulag camps.
Brutal and remote, the gulags were forced labor camps used by Stalin to purge the Soviet Union of perceived ‘enemies of the people’. The far eastern Kolyma region, infamous for its gulag, was incredibly hostile, but gold had been discovered there and the USSR needed it for development. It’s believed tens of thousands of people died en route to or working at Kolyma, mining gold, building roads or lumbering. Kolyma Highway, which leads into the area, was so notorious it was often called the “Road of Bones.”
