The Long Silence

The gulag system largely wound down after Stalin's death in 1953, when his successor Khrushchev began releasing prisoners and admitting to some of its horrors. But the full truth took decades to surface.

• Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, published in the West in 1973, exposed the system to the world
• The Soviet government denied the true scale of the camps until glasnost in the late 1980s
• Many survivors were forbidden to discuss what they had lived through until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991

The gulag's legacy raises an uncomfortable question that reaches well beyond Russia: how does a government persuade millions of ordinary people to imprison, work, and abandon their own neighbors — and then forget it ever happened?