Gulag Memories: The Rediscovery and Commemoration of Russia’s Repressive Past by Zuzanna Bogumił (review)

Zuzanna Bogumił’s monograph, Gulag Memories: The Rediscovery and Commemoration of Russia’s Repressive Past, presents a new look at the cultural memory of the Gulag in post-Soviet Russia. Her work examines the search for a “language of commemoration” initiated by the “carnival of memory” of the late 1980s. The chronology of her monograph spans 1989 to 2015, with a brief postscript on the unveiling of the Wall of Sorrow on October 30, 2017, in Moscow. Her analysis takes us to four “islands” of the Gulag Archipelago: the Solovetsky Islands (Solovki), the Komi Republic, Perm, and Kolyma. In this order, each chapter presents a case study of local memory projects, which highlights the work of a diverse cast of Memorial activists, Russian Orthodox clergy, local historians, Gulag survivors, and their families. Each chapter begins with some background information on the region’s connection to the Gulag. As a whole, Bogumił’s analysis of these regions sheds light on the ways in which local memory projects inform, and are sometimes at odds with, how the Stalinist past is understood in post-Soviet Russia.

Bogumił’s interdisciplinary approach incorporates ethnography, memory studies, and oral history. She examines a host of sources including museum exhibits, local newspapers, internet news articles, websites, scripts for guided museum tours, and interviews with some of the people involved in these projects. Bogumił’s framework rests on three key categories: Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival, Michel Foucault’s counterhistory, and Pierre Nora’s lieux de memoire. Bogumił employs Bakhtin’s carnival to describe the period of the late 1980s, which turned existing taboos against discussing Stalinist repression on their head and created a space “for shaping conventions that were to facilitate the comprehension of spoken memories and written memoirs” (P. 8). The result of this carnival of memory, as Bogumił writes, was the emergence of a Foucauldian counter-history, which made the history of Stalinist repression public and revealed that “Soviet discourse was only a falsehood, an illusion” (P. 6). During this period, it became necessary to fix the emerging counter-history of Soviet repression to the cultural landscape, which led to the rediscovery and re-creation of sites of memory. Although Bogumił refers to Nora’s lieux de memoire, her interpretation underscores the process of dynamic change these sites underwent over time (P. 8). Her examination of monuments, local history museums, and former camp cemeteries illustrates the diverse factors that affected the reconstruction of the past in places where the legacy of Stalinist repression was strongly felt.

Bogumił’s monograph contributes to the growing area of study that focuses on cultural memory and the transformation of the past following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her work primarily engages Alexander Etkind’s Warped Mourning, which explains the instability and failures of the memory of the Gulag to coalesce in the nation’s historical consciousness as a lack of memory “hardware” (monuments and markers) to anchor memory “software” (texts and memoirs) to the cultural landscape.¹ One of Bogumił’s principal conclusions locates Russia’s failure to come to terms with the past in a lack of a “comprehensive language” of commemoration that would enable museums and other memory actors to represent “the experience of the Gulag from both an objective and subjective perspective” (P. 189). Bogumił draws this conclusion from her examination of local history museum exhibits, which illustrate the difficulty of incorporating the memory of political repression into new regional and national narratives of the Soviet period. As Bogumił writes, “Gulag history was understood differently in each of the regions I have discussed, and these differences were translated into the form assumed by their local memory projects” (P. 190).

The strongest chapters of Bogumił’s monograph are the first and fourth on Solovki and Kolyma. In these chapters, Bogumił reveals the diverse actors involved in the memory projects at these two sites and how...