Gulag Legacy: Spaces of Continuity in Contemporary Everyday Practices

Abstract The era of the Soviet GULAG marked by ferocious scale of deportation and incarceration of millions generated long-lasting, precarious effect that insidiously endures across times and generations. In contemporary Russia memory about the GULAG past remains at the margins of public and official discourse and as a social fact has not yet received elaborate scholarly interpretation. The special issue seeks to address this underexplored area by examining the issue of continuity of unresolved GULAG past in the present and the ways it manifests and unfolds through spontaneous or unofficial forms of remembrance, symbolic imageries, social hierarchies, localised interaction with re-appropriated spaces and networks of former GULAG camps. The introduction discusses how the contributions to the special edition engage with the legacy of GULAG and its contemporary social dimensions, i.e. continuity of social practices, tangible and social legacy of GULAG as well as unvoiced and silenced memories, local experiences of remembrance and on-going processes of identity construction.