Russian army parade.

From Memory to Denial in Russia

It is facile to claim that Russia under Vladimir Putin is simply reverting to type, that freedom was never more than a fleeting vowel in a history of hard consonants. Although the weakness of Russia’s liberal tradition certainly played a part in Putin's rise, so did the West.

LONDON – My most painful experience in Russia was a visit to Perm-36, the only one of Stalin’s forced-labor camps to have been preserved, in 1998. I was in Perm, a city in the Urals, to take part in a seminar of the Moscow School of Political Studies. Founded by the remarkable Lena Nemirovskaya, the school’s purpose was to introduce young post-communist Russians to democracy, self-government, and capitalism.

One bitterly cold March day, I joined a few friends on a trip to the former camp. Built in the early 1940s as a “regular” labor camp, Perm-36 was converted into a concentration camp for political prisoners in 1972.

The last prisoners were released in 1987, three years into Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule. Now it was being restored as a Gulag Museum by Memorial, a human-rights group founded by the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov, to remind Russians of their totalitarian past.

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