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 Bogumil, PhD, works at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her published works include the co-authored studies The Enemy on Display: The Second World War in Eastern European Museums (Berghahn 2015) and Milieux de mémoire in Late Modernity: Local Communities, Religion, and Historical Politics (Peter Lang 2019), and co-edited volume Memory and Religion from a Postsecular Perspective (Routledge 2022).