Going round the KGB museum with 30 other people was not really a good idea. I never wanted to go before (having heard about it from Bee and Sloph's school trips). But part of my Lithuanian course includes local cultural lectures and excursions so I thought it was time to catch up.
The museum is located in the local court dating from Tsarist times but while the court was redundant for the Nazi and Soviet regimes, the prison cells were well used. Some of the museum relates how the partisans were rounded up and passed through the prison in the late 40s and 50s. You can see the cells, including the water torture cell and the execution cell.
My thoughts ranged from a) thinking I didn't know much about prisons generally and what their conditions were like in the post war period, but thinking the British ones were probably pretty much still in the Victorian conditions in which they were built and on the face of it, apart from the torture part, the cells looked pretty much like cells anywhere, not intended to be comfortable especially when crowded b) thinking that probably these days the political prisoners in the North Caucasus get pretty similar treatment or worse by the local Russian military or modern day FSB as the KGB meted out here.
The museum itself was informative and the guide sufficiently practical herding groups and giving just enough information without the previous Soviet resort always to statistics.
But going round in groups just trivialises it all, for me.
