In 1985, when a relatively young party functionary Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union, a new era began. Gorbachev started reforms that eventually led to the dissolution of the state and introduced a politics of glasnost (“openness”). Suddenly, things that had long been off-limits could be talked about: Stalinist terror, political prisons, and other unspoken parts of history. Publishers began printing literature that had been banned or heavily cut by censors, like Bulgakov’s *The Master and Margarita and *Pasternak’s *Doctor Zhivago*. The end of the USSR in 1991 accelerated this expansion of public speech. The book market of a new country—Russia—was flooded with memoirs of repression and camp testimony, along with émigré and avant-garde writing, much of it never published before. For a brief moment, under pressure from progressive politicians and activist groups, even parts of the KGB archives were opened to the public.…