Dear all,
https://www.academia.edu/117977745/The_Death_of_Alexei_Navalny_and_the_Eternal_Return_of_the_Gulag
This is an important and moving article. I was especially struck by the passage about an online initiative I had not known about.
“The Immortal Barracks” is not a parade in public, but a movement mainly online. Those who participate commemorate their relatives who suffered in the Gulag by sharing family stories, private photographs, archival documents, and oral histories by former prisoners. The emphasis of the project is on ordinary people and the subjective experience of history, as if in contrast not only to the official “The Immortal Regiment” but also to such larger-than-life survivors-turned-writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, whose takes on the camps are already well-known.
[...]
“The Immortal Barracks” is a new way of remembering the Gulag: it tells not of the human being in history, but rather the history of one human being. Photos of the dead provided by their living relatives from private collections look at us, rather than we at them. They remind us that what was lost was not millions — a number too great to even cognitively appreciate — but this one person, this one life.”
I can only quote briefly. This article deserves to be read in full!
Best Wishes, Robert
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