Never Remember: Searching for Stalin's Gulags in Putin's Russia by Masha Gessen is an attempt to remember a painful part of Soviet history. Born in Russia, Masha Gessen immigrated to the United States as a teenager with her family to escape religious persecution. Since that time, she has become an international journalist who writes for both Russian-and English-language publications. She returned to Russia to work as a journalist there but left again in 2013 to avoid anti-gay legislation. She has earned the National Book Award for nonfiction, 2017, for The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.

The book begins with the search for Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish prisoner, that existed in a Heisenberg state of being neither alive or dead. Soviets unconvincingly claimed he was dead. Sweden (and CIA) believed he was still alive with multiple sightings of the prisoner from Siberia to a mental hospital in Moscow. Wallenberg disappeared from Hungary after the Soviet occupation in World War II. Previously he was responsible for saving Jews from the Nazis. The search for him or more likely his remains, he would be 104 today, is still uncertain.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago brought back the concept of Soviet prison camps to the West's memory. Earlier Stalin's modernization of Russia was praised by many, not knowing that the labor was forced. The gulag system grew under Stalin. It was a tragedy committed against his own people. Soviet citizens were convicted in courts that the legitimacy of law or justice never appeared. This system has been effectively removed from history under Soviet leaders following Stalin and now in Russia under Putin. Gessen wants to bring back the truth and the memory.

Glasnost began in 1985 and opened some of the KGB files. Local organizations, called Memorial Societies, began forming and looking into the past trying to bring back a picture of the Gulag system that exploded under the Stalin regime. Efforts to uncover the history and extent of the prison camps were stalled with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Societies searched for bodies, execution sites, and identification. Death certificates rarely truthfully revealed the cause of death and place of death; some do indicate execution as the cause of death. Veniamin Iofe and Irina Flige of the Leningrad Memorial Society search the system and fight to gain information still closed to the public.

Stories of prisoners are included in the work. Sergei Kovaliov details his five-year imprisonment starting in 1975. The rules were excessive and impossible to follow. They were used for the most part to ensure that there was an infraction on whoever was chosen for punishment. Modern day attempts to open museums to allow people to remember the past has been difficult. Putin's political crackdown stopped much of the progress. Much like some explained slavery in America as humane -- food, clothing, shelter, and even Christianity. Currently, Russia is doing the same with its own black mark on its history. Museums show improvement in prisoner care such as the evolution of beds from planks making the environment more comfortable and humane for those serving time for crimes real or imagined.

Never Remember also contains photographs by Misha Friedman. These pictures capture the memory of former camps and pieces of evidence that remain of the system. This book is an attempt to emotionally connect the reader to a past that has been suppressed. Visually and literally stunning work.



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I’ve read dozens of books on Russian/Soviet history over the last 45+ years and admit to never having seen such a short history of the gulags. What it lacks in depth of description, this book more than makes up for in the photos of the loved and the lost who went into Stalin’s meat grinders. The grim black and white photos show what’s left of the grey world of the most notorious of the gulags; bricks, bits of metal, grey seas, stark walls amidst the forest, and monuments erected in empty spaces where thousands of prisoners were once confined, tortured, or murdered. Dark and terrible deeds were committed in these places which Soviet citizens and the world should never be allowed to forget. ( )

Russian gulags, the most known book on this subject is the [book:The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956|70561], which I have not read, the pure size and small print was too daunting. I have read about them in various fictional renderings, but this is the first non fiction book I read. I was just appalled, that is not a strong enough word, at the amount of people that were imprisoned in these barren wastelands. Many died of the conditions but millions were murdered. The difference between this mass killing in Russia, and that of the Holocaust, is that it wasn't a particular group or groups that were targeted. Sometimes it was political or activists speaking out against Stalin, but other times it almost seemed like the luck of the draw.

After Stalin's death, for once became the new if temporary rule. Many gathered at political offices trying to find out what happened to family members. Some were able to find answers and a reluctant peace. The author touring different sites of closed gulags, found see ites of mass murders, graves filled with bones. After Putin's election history is once again being rewritten in Russian.

"The cacophony conveys the sense that the Gulag meant everything and nothing. That is the distinguishing characteristic of the Putin-era historiography of Soviet terror. It says, in effect, that it just happened, whatever."

There is so much more in this book, including a look at the last Gulag. The book also has full page, black and white photos that demonstarte different aspects of these Gulags. The barreness of the surroundings, sometimes just a snap shot of broken railroad ties, a picture of the face of a woman, a forlorn watchtower amongst ruins, very effective.

The many ways history can be rewritten time and time again, depending on who is in power. The title, Never remember refers to the whitewashing of this system occuring in Putin's Russia. ( )