In 1989, the Leningrad Memorial Society organized what they called Days of Memory at Solovki. Many of Russia’s most prominent intellectuals had been interned there. They started at Solovki, an archipelago in the White Sea where the first Soviet camp for political prisoners was set up in 1923. In the second half of the 1980s, under perestroika and the accompanying policy of glasnost, Memorial Societies began their search.

Some even thought it would be a sufficient condition. They just assumed that something like decommunization would happen and that accurate historical information - accurate factual memory - was a necessary condition. And perhaps because Germany had been both Russia’s enemy and its counterpart, they did not give much thought to the circumstances of denazification - not to the fact that the process had taken decades or to the fact that the Germans had not chosen the policy for themselves but had it forced on them by the Allies.

These memory activists knew even less about the world than they did about Russia’s own history, but they had heard of denazification, a policy and campaign that seemed to have cleansed Germany of the legacy of totalitarianism. It seemed self-evident that once the facts were established, some sort of reckoning would have to follow. By restoring humanity posthumously, they hoped to restore humanity to the country itself. The early Memorial Societies looked for the bodies, the execution sites, the documents identifying the bodies - the truth. That was when there was any paperwork at all. There was no telling, though often the paperwork claimed that a gulag victim had lived long past the actual execution date. “Cause of death” was usually a lie - “heart failure,” “pneumonia,” nothing at all - but sometimes the truth: “execution.” The line that was most likely to be true was the one that indicated the date of death. The death certificates could contain perhaps two truths and a lie, sometimes one truth and two lies. Gessen’s book The Future Is History won the 2017 National Book Award for non-fiction. By Masha Gessen, from Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s Gulags in Putin’s Russia, which will be published next month by Columbia Global Reports.

The future is history masha