Zuzanna Bogumił. Gulag Memories: The Rediscovery and Commemoration of Russia’s Repressive Past. Translated by Philip Palmer.

Abstract

When describing the era of return from the Gulag, Anna Akhmatova famously stated: “Two Russias stand eyeball to eyeball, those who were imprisoned, and those who put them there.” Today many Russias still stand eyeball to eyeball, and there are multiple memories of Russia’s past. There is the “heroic” conquering of the North, the rapid industrialization, the victory in the “Great Patriotic War,” and other achievements of the Stalin era, and there are the millions of Gulag prisoners whose victimization can be traced back, in part, to those very same events. Zuzanna Bogumił’s important book Gulag Memories: The Rediscovery and Commemoration of Russia’s Repressive Past analyzes not so much these battles of memory—they are a backdrop—but rather their expression in the social and political struggle for memorialization and, to paraphrase James Young, the texture of Gulag memory. Zuzanna Bogumił conducted site visits and interviews, primarily from 2006 to 2008, at...