Memorial to the Victims of Communism hosts exhibition dedicated to victims of the Great Terror in the URSS

The exhibition "Ultima privire sub gloantele comunismului" [The Last Look Under the Bullets of Communism], which presents 25 portraits of victims of the "Great Terror in the USSR" from 1937 to 1938, will be open to the public from April 4 to June 15, at the headquarters of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and the Resistance.Writer Ana Blandiana, co-founder of the Sighet Memorial and the Civic Academy Foundation, will speak in the opening of the exhibition alongside historian Armand Gosu and the president of the Romanian Cultural Institute, Liviu Jicman, the Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR) informs on Monday.The event is organized by the Civic Academy Foundation - Memorial to the Victims of Communism and the Resistance, with the support of the ICR.The works were created by French artist Madeleine Melot in oil on wood. These are inspired by photographs discovered in the Moscow archives by the Polish journalist and photographer Tomasz Kizny and published in his album "The Great Terror in the USSR (1937 - 1938)," published in 2013 by Noir sur Blanc publishing house.The exhibition was opened in 2021 as a tribute by Madeleine Melot to her French-Polish friend Jacques Rossi, a survivor of the Soviet Gulag (20 years of detention), but also to all the victims of the Great Terror in the USSR. The series of portraits was donated by Madeleine Melot, in December 2024, to the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and the Resistance, thus enriching its art collection, which also includes works by Camilian Demetrescu, Ovidiu Maitec, Peter Jacobi, Christian Paraschiv, Aurel Vlad, Silvia Radu, Mariana Macri, Serbana Dragoescu, Victor Cupsa, Mircea Hristescu, Oana Ril, the same source informs.Madeleine Melot (1936 - 2025) was a graduate of the National School of Crafts in Paris and the School of Fine Arts in Paris."Madeleine Melot did not set out to interpret, but to reproduce in a way as faithfully as possible these faces possessed by fear. Her artistic touch is a bearer of humanity, of which that universe had been widowed. Look at the paintings, scrutinize the portraits, imprint their gazes on you and you will suddenly have the impression that they are calling you for help, that they are crying out their despair, their inability to understand, the fatality, experienced by these sacrifices caught in the nets of a murderous policy, whose reasons and interests they could not understand, knowing only that they would lose their lives," said Thierry Wolton, author of the trilogy "A World History of Communism."