* * *

The hard part was not, actually, getting access to the famous specimens, whose modern provenance is well documented. The unknown prisoners had turned the squirrels over to the Gulag camp’s geologist, Yuriy Popov, who gave two of them to the Zoological Museum in what is now St. Petersburg. The third, preserved in alcohol, is at the Magadan Regional Museum of Local Lore, closer to the camp where it was originally found.

Years ago, Formozov and his colleagues took some mummified squirrel tissue and extracted their DNA. They did it three or four times, only to end up with three or four different results. The problem, it turned out, was their lab, which was contaminated with DNA from modern day ground squirrels they also studied. The results always matched whatever modern squirrel species happened to be in the lab recently.

Ancient DNA is tricky like this. Over time, long coiled strands of DNA fragment into shorter pieces. The older, the more fragmented, leaving few intact strands for the scientists to sequence. Meanwhile, the cells of present-day ground squirrels are bursting with fresh DNA that can easily drown out the bits of intact ancient DNA. “It is impossible to study ancient and modern DNA of the same group at the same time in a lab,” Formozov wrote to me in an email. “So we stopped.”

Then, a reunion with an old university classmate, Marina Faerman, set things back on course. At a mutual friend’s apartment in 2010, Formozov remet Faerman, who like many Russians of Jewish descent, had moved to Israel in the 1980s. She now had a lab at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem studying ancient human DNA, which meant 1) she was an expert in handling ancient DNA and 2) her lab was uncontaminated by modern squirrels. “It took about a minute to convince her to take part in this project,” said Formozov.

Around this time, Formozov remembered the preface to The Gulag Archipelago, which he, like many in the then Soviet Union, vividly recalls reading. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book was the first historical account of what happened in the Gulag camps, and it circulated in samizdat in the Soviet Union. Formozov’s family owned the first volume, he says, smuggled in from the west. The second volume was passed among friends, who had it for a few days at a time. The third volume was “extremely rare,” and he recalls having only three hours to read it in a friend’s home. If he could find the scientific paper referenced by Solzhenitsyn, Formozov thought, perhaps he could learn more about the origin of these mummified squirrels. In half an hour of scanning old copies of the journal Priroda, he found the original note by Yuriy Popov, the Gulag camp geologist.*

For Formozov, this wasn’t just an interesting bit of trivia, but the meeting of two long-time interests. About twenty-five years earlier, he learned that two of his teachers had taken part in the bloody uprising at Kengir, another Soviet labor camp, that is described in detail in The Gulag Archipelago. He became interested in the Kengir uprising and helped organize international conferences about Gulag uprisings in the early 1990s. It is with the weight of all this history in mind that he took to studying the squirrels originally found by Gulag prisoners.