Mask of Sorrow is a brutalist monument located in Magadan, Russia. The statue 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. Ernest Neizvestny created the design; the monument’s constructor was Kamil Kazaev, and it was unveiled in 1996.
Mask of Sorrow is 15 meters high. It consists of a large face that is shedding a tear from the left eye.
The tear is made up of various 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. All these elements represent the cruelties that the people of Magadan and other prisoners went through in the Gulags.
