GULAG XR
Individual parts of the educational programme:
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What is Gulag XR?
It is a new educational programme based on historical and archaeological research combined with modern technologies such as virtual and augmented reality and comics.
Its name is European Memory of the Gulag – Extended Reality as an Educational Tool – or Gulag XR for short.
Who is the programme intended for?
This educational programme is intended for primary school students from the 8th year up and for secondary schools in the Czech, Slovak, Polish, German, English and Russian language versions.
What is the purpose of the programme?
The objective is to create an entirely new approach to teaching about Soviet repressions through which students get to experience the atmosphere of the Gulag and obtain more knowledge and experiences than in standard classes thanks to innovative technologies and approaches (a major part of the programme is in a comic book form). Through real-life stories, we intend to illustrate the various forms of repression: mass deportations, executions and Gulag camps, and we perceive the word ‘Gulag’ in the title as the principal symbol that stands for all of the aforementioned crimes.
We also want to point out the shared European and generally international dimension of Soviet repressions with our project.
Who is backing the project?
Gulag XR is being developed under the guidance of the Czech association Gulag.cz in collaboration with the educational agency Scio, Germany’s Memorial, Poland’s College of Eastern Europe and the Slovak branch of Post Bellum. The technological solution (virtual and augmented reality) relies on the results of Gulag.cz team’s expeditions and field research. The project is financed under the European Erasmus Plus programme.
We also developed a Russian version of the project with Memorial, Russia’s memory association and the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, with the focus of the collaboration with Memorial being the content of the project.
Why?
The victims of the Soviet government terror (we are focusing on the totalitarian period of Stalin’s rule from the 1930s to the 1950s) included thousands of Czechs, Germans, Poles, Slovaks and people of other European nationalities. Despite that, this topic is generally not perceived as our shared history and approaches to it vary broadly from one country to the next. While the prevalent narrative in Poland is that the Soviet despotism claimed hundreds of thousands of innocent victims, these perceptions are tabooed to a great extent in Germany (although there were more than one million innocent Germans among the regime’s victims). The topic is largely unknown to the general public in the Czech and Slovak Republics – there is not a single mention of Czech and Slovak victims of Soviet repressions in history textbooks.
To chart the situation in the individual countries, we prepared an analysis based on questionnaires and interviews with teachers, which has identified the specific needs and baselines for our programme. The analysis also covers the rate of use of modern technologies in schools in the countries involved.
Partners
Gulag XR team of authors and collaborators
Project manager, project script writer: Petra Černoušková | Educational methodology: Andrej Novik | Consultants: Dalibor Naar, Štěpán Černoušek | Czech stories, field and archive research: Štěpán Černoušek | Polish stories, Polish version coordinators: Adam Balcer, Grzegorz Szymborski | Slovak stories, Slovak version coordinators: Peter Juščák, Dominika Gerhátová, Dagmar Kudelová-Kopčanská | German stories, German version coordinator: Daria Buteiko | Expert consultant: Andrej Zubov (Masaryk University), Ljuba Jurgenson (Sorbonne University) | PR and media: Magdaléna Hájková | COMIC BOOK AUTHOR: | Jakub Dušek | AUGMENTED REALITY (AR): | Programmer: Jan Vrátný | 3D items: Pavel Matoušek | Videos in AR: Igor Suvorov | Voices of the recollections in AR: Barbora Vašíčková and Marek Nagl | Interview in AR: Boris Belenkin and Štěpán Černoušek | VIRTUAL REALITY (VR): | 3D animation: Josef Brošta | Programmer: Martin Tichota | GRAPHIC AND WEB DESIGN: | Jan Vrátný | VIDEOS: | Directing and editing of the introductory video and video stories, production: Tomáš Polenský | Editing on Russian video stories: Michal Dvořák | Animation: Vojtěch Dudek | Sound recording: Radim Lapčík, Jan Balcar | Sound design: Pavel Matyáš | Guides to the Czech stories and the introductory video: Tomáš Dalecký, Johana Valešová, Barbora Vašíčková, Marek Nagl | Guides to the Russian stories: Igor Suvorov, Alexandra Skorvid | Guides to the German stories: Mathias Straub, Teresa Weisser | Guides to the Slovak stories: Dominika Gerhátova, Lukáš Herc | Guides to the Polish stories: Mikołaj Tyczyński, Barbara Gregorczyk | Collaborators: Andrea Šťastná, Zuzana Zoubková | Production, subtitles: Petra Burová | Soundtrack: Storyblocks