Vieda Skultans is professor emerita and senior research fellow at the School of Sociology,
Politics, and International Studies, University of Bristol.
Address for correspondence: 11 Priory Road, Bristol, BS8 1UQ, UK.
v.skultans@bristol.ac.uk.

Much of what happened in the Gulag has been left unrecorded, unexamined, and unexpiated. The historian David Satter recently made the assertion that “Russia today is haunted by words that have been left unsaid” (2013:111). This important special issue of Laboratorium on the Gulag goes a considerable way towards correcting this lacuna. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s emblematic coupling of the incarcerations on Solovetskii Islands with Auschwitz draws our attention to the similar brutal activities in these morally close but geographically far-removed sites. Solzhenitsyn writes of how “the ovens of the Arctic Auschwitz had been lit right there” ([1973] 1975:45). However, the subsequent visibility and representation of these sites, their posthumous existence, if you like, have been very different. While the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, thus revealing to the world what had gone on there, no such revelatory liberation happened for the inmates of the Gulag camps. Indeed, the liberation of the one could be said to have promoted the unfettered development of the other. Remembering one atrocity is often an excuse for neglecting others (Skultans 2014). Not only was physical distance a barrier to revelation but, more importantly, the lack of a visual record of Gulag atrocities and the willingness of Western visitors to be duped helped to contribute to the unreal status of these places and activities. Anthropologist Piers Vitebsky has stated that Siberia was for his family a catastrophe rather than a place (2005:vii–xi). A prime example of this readiness to be duped is provided by US Vice President Henry A. Wallace’s visit to Kolyma in June 1944. His book Soviet Asia Mission (Wallace and Steiger 1946), published two years later, makes ironic reading describing as it does the strong physique of the workers and their excellent pay and working conditions. A review in the Far Eastern Survey describes it as “an important contribution to the library of books-for-world-peace” (Watson 1946:287). Indeed, the massive movement of political prisoners by sea (some one million between 1932 and 1953) from Vladivostok to Kolyma was carried out with the help of the ship Indigirka, constructed in Wisconsin and sold to the NKVD in 1938. The naval historian Martin James Bollinger writes that “the West was a vital but unwitting accomplice in the Kolyma transport operation” (2003:119).