Remembering the Gulag: A History of Coming to Terms with the Past in Russia’s Far North, 1987-2020
Join the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute for an online talk with Tyler Kirk on the history of gulags in Russia's Komi Republic and why this history is emblematic of processes that unfolded throughout the world’s first socialist state as it came to an end. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the historical and human rights society Memorial provided an outlet to document and publicize abuses of the totalitarian regime. In the Komi Republic, a region in Russia’s Far North that was home to one of the densest networks of Soviet labor camps, the local Memorial Society received a flood of correspondence, which began during glasnost and continued following the Soviet Union’s collapse. This posed intense dilemmas that revealed both the legacy of the Gulag and the local politics of memory during a revolutionary moment in Soviet and post-Soviet history. Tyler Kirk will explain this local history and why the story it tells is emblematic of processes that unfolded throughout the world’s first socialist state as it came to an end.
RSVP is requested; information can be found at this link.
Speakers:
Tyler Kirk, assistant professor, University of Alaska, Fairbanks