I don’t usually like reading about contemporary explorations of the concept of memory; maybe I just hadn’t read the right essays yet. These ones are fantastic: approachable, personal and journalistic, wry. Political historical context is deftly woven in, but the real story being told is about how individual Russians today are trying to preserve, forget, rewrite, or overlook the Gulag and the period of The Great Terror—and this includes varied approaches across different political regimes. It’s more interesting than it sounds.

The photos were beautifully somber and did much to set the mood. I wish they had leaned a bit more towards the documentary journalistic side, or at least the image captions could have been placed closer to the photos, rather than at the very end of the book.