
Russia under Vladimir Putin has been rewriting the Soviet past as glorious, which demands the elision of terror, from forgetting mass execution sites in Medvezhyegorsk in the Arctic to isolating uranium mines in Kolyma in the Far East, to repurposing the country's only gulag museum, Perm 36, as a museum of secret-police valor.Masha Gessen is a Russian and American journalist, author, translator and activist who has been an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. She is a prolific author, whose recent books include The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. She and photographer Michael Friedman journey to Siberia to document the erasure of Russia's history and show the alarming transformation of Russia under authoritarian rule.