Thirty years on, I recall that moment with a bitter feeling. In the early s, visitors flocked to the small house where Memorial had its offices. They brought documents, memoirs of prisons and labour camps, letters from gulags, and little notes that had been thrown from freight cars in transit and had miraculously reached their intended recipients. Other objects from the gulags included plywood labour camp trunks, quilted prison jackets with inmate numbers, jagged spoons and bowls.
Visitors brought handwritten books, embroidery, drawings and watercolours that they had managed to hide during searches of their cells.
This led to the creation of an archive at Memorial, a collection of thousands of fragments of family memories. At the time we thought this was only the beginning of a long process and that our new political leaders had realised that getting to grips with the past was a key task. But the reformers lacked interest in history; they were in a rush to build a market economy.
They were disappointed, and felt reforms were never truly accomplished. Russian society succumbed to weariness and indifference. It has stopped being an affordable paradise, and now, after hosting the Winter Olympics in , is home to multiple international sporting events and conferences each year. Expensive apartment buildings pop out where gardens once blossomed, skyscrapers planted with luxurious apartments for Muscovites. Part of this is because Putin has made Sochi his de facto summer residence.
People instead take videos of the ridiculous green fence hiding the sprawling Black Sea resort from the public view. But something more profound is changing, too. Read: A theatrical Moscow trial draws the ire of Russia's cultural elite. More generally, a Soviet and Stalin-era revival is under way. This year, authorities in the Siberian town of Tyumen, in the heart of the Gulag region, banned a mass prayer for victims of Soviet repression. And despite some pushback—thousands of people recently stood outside a former KGB prison on Lubyanka Square to read aloud the names of victims of the Soviet regime—a majority of Russians nevertheless have a favorable view of Stalin.
Putin himself, it seems, sometimes seeks to mimic the Soviet dictator. Image source, Getty Images. Soviet-era relics are kept in Moscow's Fallen Monument Park.
State propaganda: Ms Schulmann said "let's not shut our eyes to the fact that Stalin is being touted as the victor in the war and a wise leader.
And essentially the Soviet period is being touted as the best possible time". Anti-elite feelings: "This is the most interesting part," said Ms Schulmann. Stalin front row, R hosted fellow war leaders Churchill and Roosevelt in Yalta in early President Putin frequently reminds Russians of the nation's wartime heroism. Related Topics. Of course Mr Putin is not Stalin.
He has not — yet — declared war on an economic class such as the kulaks, not engaged in a murderous campaign of modern day antisemitism, as Stalin was about to embark upon at the moment of his death. Today the only regime that attempts to follow such ideals is North Korea, the last Stalinist state in the world.
For all its faults, contemporary Russia is not about to relapse into those hermit ways. What Mr Putin has done is much more insidious and dangerous. Thus some of the forms and realities of normal democratic life are preserved and human rights and the rule of law intermittently upheld, but against the constant background pressure of corruption and legalised oppression. It is a model of leadership that has been admired, and to a degree emulated, by the likes of Recep Erdogan, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orban and, of course, Donald Trump.
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