Abstract

Though the institution of the Gulag was nominally closed over half a decade ago, it lives on as an often hotly contested site of memory in the post-socialist era. This ethnographic study takes a holistic, comprehensive approach to understanding memories of the Gulag, and particularly the language of commemoration that surrounds it in present-day Russian society. It focuses on four regions of particular historical significance—the Solovetsky Islands, the Komi Republic, the Perm region, and Kolyma—to carefully explore how memories become a social phenomenon, how objects become heritage, and how the human need to create sites of memory has preserved the Gulag in specific ways today.

Zuzanna Bogumił is Assistant Professor at the Maria Grzegorzewska University in Warsaw. Her publications include the co-authored study The Enemy on Display: The Second World War in Eastern European Museums (Berghahn 2015) and trhe co-edited volume Stare i nowe tendencje w obszarze pamięci społecznej [The Old and New Tendencies in Social Memory] (Scolar 2018).