ABSTRACT
The experience of the Gulag occurred on so vast a geographical, historical and social scale that it raises a huge set of questions regarding the traces left by the collective experiment in state violence. With the assistance of the Memorial Foundation, in 2002 the chapter describes fieldwork in a small provincial city with close links to the Gulag, aiming to observe how the former prisoners and former neighbours of one particular camp had come to terms with the material and symbolic traces of the Soviet concentrationary system. In the case of the Gulag, literal denial has been transferred from the dominant symbolic space onto that of Soviet society as a whole, through language. The silences to which victims of the Gulags resort thus represent linguistic ways around some awkward questions. Given the length of the testimony collected and the mass of documentation provided by the fund, Memorial, it might seem paradoxical to wish to examine the question of silence.
