by Nikita Zakharov, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Freiburg, Germany

In collaboration with CEBRIG

Does the institutionalized memory of past repression help a society resist a return to autocracy? We study Russia, which confronted the Soviet terror in a brief reckoning during the 1990s and then abandoned it, leaving the memory deepest near the 414 former administrative centers of the Gulag. This memory is alive and responds to the official calendar: every October, around the Day of Remembrance, searches for the history of repression and commemorative posts by local administrations spike near the former camps. The same communities dissent when the state moves against society: over two decades their protest rises and falls with the intensity of the national confrontation, and after the 2022 invasion they record roughly 40 percent more anti-war detentions than their same-region neighbors. In surveys, voiced opposition to the war is 2.8 percentage points higher near the camps, entirely among the generation schooled after the collapse of the USSR; among older cohorts, who could remember the repression or have learned of it privately, the effect is absent. We interpret this as awareness raised by institutions: post-Soviet schools taught the history of the terror, and the memorials and commemoration around the former camps kept it present. The memory of repression, unlike the repression itself, is a policy: governments decide whether it stays in public view, and the decision shapes a society's capacity to resist.

Thursday 3rd September 2026, 12:15pm - 14pm

Room R42.2.113
Building R42 - Level
av F Roosevelt 42
1050 Bruxelles

Entrée libre

Contact : aude.merlin@ulb.be et P-Guillaume.Meon@ulb.be