The Gulag, the system of concentration camps through which the Soviet Union carried out murderous political repression, is something many Russians and Ukrainians would rather forget.

But while the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin is encouraging Russia’s public amnesia about the Gulag, which reached its worst excesses under Joseph Stalin, the savage Soviet dictator currently undergoing rehabilitation by the Kremlin, in both Russia and Ukraine, memories of the Gulag are also simply dying of old age.