“The Gulag is Right Here”: Representations of Repressions and the Problem of Evil

When Nikita Khrushchev dismantled the Soviet penal system known as the Gulag in 1960, he likely could not have imagined that the name would appear in the title of a book published last year about Aleksei Navalny’s death: Murder in the Gulag. However, the concept’s current comeback has been a long time in the making — in society as well as in culture. This presentation examines representations of Soviet repressions in recent Russian and Ukrainian films, specifically Ivan Denisovich (2021), based on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novella from 1962, “Sententia” (2020), based on the last years of Varlam Shalamov’s life, and “Censored” (2019), about the life and death of Vasyl Stus.

Central to my analysis of these films is the idea of the postmemory generation, which was originally articulated by Marianne Hirsch for those who inherited the trauma of the Holocaust. Although some of those who inherited the trauma of the Gulag also belong to the postmemory generation, I will argue that the designation is no longer applicable to all. Unlike the Holocaust, which is often perceived as a concluded historical event, the Gulag appears more and more as an open-ended experience and therefore a prolonged reality as repressions increase in contemporary Russia. This evolving dynamic raises a pressing question: Is Soviet postmemory now transforming into Russian pre-memory? This presentation is a search for an answer to this question as well as for a framework for interpreting and preserving the past while mediating its implications for the present and future.

Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil” and the Russian government’s official policy to “perpetuate the memory of victims of political repression” (adopted in 2015, revised in 2024), I explore these films and their adaptations of literary narratives and attempt to map some possible routes for the lasting legacy of the Gulag today.

Josefina Lundblad-Janjic is an expert in Russian literature, holding a BA from Gothenburg University (Sweden), an MA from Ural State University (Yekaterinburg, Russia), and a PhD from UC Berkeley. Initially a Dostoevsky scholar, she shifted her focus to the literature of the Gulag, and defended her dissertation on the late works of Varlam Shalamov in 2017. Her extensive research on Shalamov includes multiple articles and the recent completion of the first English-language biography about him. Her other two most recent research projects concern children in the Gulag and the novel Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman.