The Memorial Museum of Political Repression

Tomsk is home to a unique museum in Russia. Most Russians are not interested in remembering the horrors of Stalin - the gulags, the purges, the "Five Year Plans". However, here in the heart of Siberia, there is one tiny underground museum that witnesses to the atrocities millions of people suffered during the Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was the first guest. It's located in a former KGB building, where political prisoners were interrogated and locked up before being executed. The layout of the museum is quite simple. It consists of a couple of rooms with photographs of those who perished and an example of what a typical cell was like. I was immediately drawn to a picture of a young priest, his wife and three children. They looked so calm and peaceful in the photograph. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for this priest to be separated from his loved ones, to sit in a cramped little cell with twenty other prisoners, to endure the stench of unwashed humanity in the final hours of one's life, and to be led out of this hell to be shot.

The temptation to wallow in depression in moments like this is great. And for this reason, I'm grateful for a certain person, who shall remain nameless, who opened the hatch of the cell directly onto my face, leading to a bloody nose. It provided some much needed comic relief. I just hope my nose won't become gangrenous.