The shape of the building symbolized its construction to house prominent Ukrainian writers, who lived there in over sixty apartments.

Built in the late 1920s, it accommodated Ukrainian writers and poets, many of whom were later shot by the Communist authorities at Sandarmokh in Karelia.

[4] In the mid-1920s, Ostap Vyshnya, at that time part of a writers' organization called плуг, meaning the "Plough", asked the Soviet government to build an apartment complex to accommodate the most important Ukrainian intellectuals.

[9] Through the tapping of telephones and other methods, the occupants of the Slovo Building were kept under close surveillance and in constant danger of being reported by their neighbors and arrested.

Actress Halyna Mnevska was the first to be arrested on 20 January 1931 because she did not want to denounce her husband, Klym Polishchuk; in 1937 he was shot at Sandarmokh in Karelia.

Ukrainian writer, Mykhailo Yalovy was arrested on 12 May 1933, accused of espionage and planning to assassinate the first secretary of the Kharkiv Party Committee Pavel Postyshev; he would be later to be executed at Sandarmokh on 11 March 1937.

Others were arrested and sent to the Solovki prison camp in the White Sea: Les Kurbas, Ostap Vyshnya, Mykola Kulish and Hryhorii Epik.

Subsequently, they were all executed at Sandarmokh, except for Vyshnya (Cherry) who survived because he was ill.[6] Forty of the 66 apartments in the Slovo Building were affected.

A total of 33 were executed; five were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment in the Gulag; one committed suicide and another died in unclear circumstances.

[4] In 1934, the capital moved from Kharkiv to Kyiv, partly due to the famine or Holodomor and to the arrests, imprisonment and executions.

In English or Ukrainian the audience can observe the timeline of the building, 3D visualization of each apartment, photographs of each resident, maps, and memoirs.