On Wednesday night, in the beautifully furnished Embassy of Kazakhstan, seventy spectators gathered around a collection of paintings depicting one of the ugliest things in modern history: the gulag.

The stately Kazakh ambassador, Erlan A. Idrissov, noted the “moral and spiritual meaning” in these paintings, which convey “the cruelty of the gulag system to the world.” Kazakhstan itself was home to “the most cruel” camps, even the ugliest one, “for the wives of the betrayers of the motherland.” One sixth of the world “witnessed a very huge social experiment under Stalin,” he said. Stalin’s regime tortured 60 million people, and 25 million did not survive.

The paintings, a gift to the Heritage Foundation from the Jamestown Foundation, will move to the Bush 41 presidential library in Houston come September. They include several works by Nikolai Getman, imprisoned in the gulag between 1945 and 1953: small wooden barracks, temperatures of 30 degrees below zero, grasping hunger, and days spent merely surviving. Getman believed it his duty to “leave behind a testimony to the fate of the millions of prisoners who died.” He escaped to paint more than 50 pictures; his brother perished in the gulag.

It is fitting that Kazakhstan, which witnessed the most terrible prison camps, would host this event at its embassy. Kazakhstan’s gulag became a “melting pot” for Central Asian peoples, as millions were forced to go there. Today these people live in harmony, and in December, Kazakhstan will celebrate 20 years of independence.

But Communism still haunts their memories. One of Getman’s paintings proved especially chilling: a man hung up on a tree to be tortured by mosquitoes, gazing down in despair, his limp body looking more like a skeleton. As these victims cry out from the canvas, mutilated by their Soviet captors, Idrissov speaks for all as he proclaims, “We will never forget,” and, more chilling, “we will never forgive.”