Never Remember

"A book that belongs on the shelf alongside The Gulag Archipelago."  -- Kirkus Reviews

"Drawing on years of interviews, research, and travel, Gessen and photographer Friedman reflect on complex Russian attitudes to the legacy of the gulag in this vital collection of essays and photographs....Friedman's moody, panoramic black-and-white photos of the memorial sites convey a narrative that's fragmented, blurry, and ultimately incomplete, perfectly underscoring Gessen's text. The combination is a powerful meditation on contemporary Russia as seen through its relationship to the past." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A haunting literary and visual journey deep into Russia's past -- and present.
The Gulag was a monstrous network of labor camps that held and killed millions of prisoners from the 1930s to the 1950s. More than half a century after the end of Stalinist terror, the geography of the Gulag has been barely sketched and the number of its victims remains unknown. Has the Gulag been forgotten? Writer Masha Gessen and photographer Misha Friedman set out across Russia in search of the memory of the Gulag. They journey from Moscow to Sandarmokh, a forested site of mass executions during Stalin's Great Terror; to the only Gulag camp turned into a museum, outside of the city of Perm in the Urals; and to Kolyma, where prisoners worked in deadly mines in the remote reaches of the Far East. They find that in Vladimir Putin's Russia, where Stalin is remembered as a great leader, Soviet terror has not been forgotten: it was never remembered in the first place.

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and the bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin. Gessen's books include The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction) and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Gessen is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Fellowship, and Gessen's work appears regularly in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Vanity Fair. Gessen is a visiting professor at Amherst College. A longtime resident of Moscow, Gessen now lives in New York City.

Misha Friedman is a photographer whose work is regularly featured in leading publications, including The New Yorker, Time, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and The New York Times. He is the author of Lyudmila and Natasha: Russian Lives and Photo 51. Friedman's photography awards include grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, and his photographs have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the world. A native of Moldova, Friedman lives in New York City.