Searching for Memory of the Gulags in Putin’s Russia | The New Yorker

The photographer Misha Friedman and I travelled in Russia in 2016, looking, as we put it in the subtitle of a new book, “Never Remember,” “for Stalin’s Gulags in Putin’s Russia.” We wanted to document memory—or the lack of memory. We began in places where I had reported two decades earlier, when memory activists, then often with the aid of local officials, created memorials or museums. We wanted to see how those sites had changed in the twenty years since, as Joseph Stalin’s image was being burnished—to the point that he now consistently tops polls asking Russians to choose the greatest man who ever lived.