Never remember Searching for Stalin's Gulags in Putin's Russia

HUMAN BEINGS HAVE long slaughtered each other with gusto, but almost always choose mass victims from a group defined as alien. The Nazis killed about six million Jews; Japanese invaders massacred millions of Chinese; European settlers in the Americas enslaved millions of Africans; the list goes on. But the striking thing about Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, as the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen observes in her new book, "Never Remember," is that "Russians exerted the force of state terror against themselves.... The millions who died anonymously in the Gulag were not necessarily members of ethnic or religious minorities, or even homosexuals: The population of the camps largely corresponded to the population of the country." Although at times the dictator's venom did target particular groups, like Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars and, at the very end of his life, Jews, this is largely true. The mass deaths at Soviet execution sites or in labor camps were a self-inflicted genocide: "Russians had no other nation to blame for their nightmare." When, as Gessen adds, "every museum, indeed every country, ultimately aims to tell a story about the goodness of its people," how, then, do you remember a system that led to the outright execution of somewhere around a million people and the deaths by starvation or exposure in the Gulag of an unknown additional number, generally reckoned far into the millions? The answer, in Vladimir Putin's Russia, is hardly at all. This wasn't always so. In 1991,1 lived in Russia for five months, working on a book about how Soviets were coming to terms with the Stalin era. There was still some exhilaration in the air at how, under Mikhail Gorbachev, you could now discuss and explore things that had been off limits for some 70 years. I met dozens of researchers studying that dark era, including an imaginative high school history teacher who staged a mock trial of Stalin in his class and people who were digging up mass graves (at one in Siberia I could see the bullet hole in each earth-stained skull). Activists in Moscow put on an evening of poetry and music performed by, or in honor of, Gulag survivors. Museums displayed prison camp artifacts. In the Kolyma region of Russia's far northeast I visited the most desolate place I have ever seen, Butugychag, a barren, rocky valley streaked with snow even in June, where thousands of prisoners had been worked to death mining tin and uranium, their bodies thrown down unused mine shafts. But the man with me from the Memorial Society, a human rights group, eagerly talked about how places like this could be turned into remembrance sites with lessons for today, as has happened at Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps. Gessen and Misha Friedman, who took the grainy, haunting photographs for this book, also visited Butugychag, but found no memorials there. Virtually the only place in Russia where this has happened is a former labor camp outside of Perm, in the Urals, carefully restored over some years. But then something occurred that was never anticipated. Under Putin - whose motto might as well be "Make Russia Great Again" - Stalin's rule is now remembered as a time of glory and order. Scores of new books and films portray the era in glowing colors, and vintage secret police uniforms are on sale. The husband-andwife team who spearheaded the restoration at Perm lost their jobs, and the rebuilt camp has now become a site of pilgrimage for those who want to celebrate the old days. It is a grim reminder that once again, as in the 1930s, all over the world authoritarian strongmen are riding high. ADAM HOCHSCHILD'S most recent book is "Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939."

Drawing on years of interviews, research, and travel, Gessen (The Future Is History) and photographer Friedman reflect on complex Russian attitudes to the legacy of the gulag in this vital collection of essays and photographs. Established in 1930, the gulag was a vast, brutal network of prison camps kept secret from the general population, in which millions of Soviet citizens were imprisoned or killed. Touching on the various populations of the camps, from the victims of Stalin's terror to later anti-Soviet dissidents, Gessen's brief essays focus on contemporary physical markers of the gulag-the symbolic manifestations of how people choose to remember, or not remember, what happened. Many of the people she writes about are those who are invested in maintaining the known sites of camps: for example, Veniamin Iofe and Irina Flige, two members of the human rights organization Memorial, who discovered a mass grave in Sandormokh and worked with government agencies and other activists to eventually erect a series of monuments. Friedman's moody, panoramic black-and-white photos of the memorial sites convey a narrative that's fragmented, blurry, and ultimately incomplete, perfectly underscoring Gessen's text. The combination is a powerful meditation on contemporary Russia as seen through its relationship to the past. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A charged indictment of Soviet terror and historical amnesia alike.If one were needed, a sure sign of the increasingly totalitarian drift of Putin's Russia is the steady rehabilitation of Stalin, long hidden away but now safe enough to be commemorated at a Moscow subway stop. Moscow-born journalist Gessen (The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, 2017, etc.), the indefatigable chronicler of the low-grade fever of tyranny, provides a searching text on the prison state that was Stalin's Russia, accompanied by photographs by Moldovan native Friedman. His work is much reminiscent of Cartier-Bresson's, though with a darkness and graininess that suggest that a permanent pall lies atop the Siberian landscape, a place of endless uranium mines and cemeteries. The text opens with Gessen's meditation on what might have happened to the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, spirited into the gulag at the end of World War II and one of its best-known occupants. As the author notes, were he alive, he would be 104, which makes his death "finally, a fact," if one with "no known circumstance of specific cause." So it is with the whole gulag enterprise: if it were meant to terrorize the populace on the part of the apparatchiks and secret police, "then shouldn't they want to carry out the executions in the public square?" No, and for some reason, most of the extrajudicial activity of the Soviet state took place in darkness. As they travel the land, Gessen and Friedman document some of the efforts of Russians to commemorate the fallen, such as a reconstructed labor camp so chillingly accurate in its detail that, a former political prisoner averred, it "felt exactly like a real Soviet-era prison camp," a comment its restorer and curator accepted as a compliment. But those efforts may be vain, Gessen suggests, in the face of widespread public indifference in the Putin era, as if to say that the Soviet terror "just happened, whatever."A book that belongs on the shelf alongside The Gulag Archipelago. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.