More than 300 designs have been submitted as a part of a competition to create a monument honoring the victims of political repression in Russia, the TASS news agency reported Wednesday.
"The application period is now over, and around 300 designs have been submitted. An expert group comprised of architecture, sculpture and fine arts experts and City Hall officials will start work now" to decide on the criteria for the winning design, which will then be selected by an expert jury, Mikhail Fedotov, chairman of the Presidential Council for Human Rights, was quoted as saying by TASS.
The monument will be erected at the intersection of Prospekt Sakharova, named after the Soviet dissident and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, and the city's Garden Ring.
Fedotov said all the designs will be presented at an exhibition, and expressed hope that the project would be open for public discussion. He said fundraising for the monument's construction has already begun, TASS reported.
Millions of Soviet citizens were executed or spent years in the gulag labor camps as a result of political repression in the Soviet era.
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