By Masha Gessen, from Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s Gulags in Putin’s Russia, which will be published next month by Columbia Global Reports. Gessen’s book The Future Is History won the 2017 National Book Award for non-fiction.

The death certificates could contain perhaps two truths and a lie, sometimes one truth and two lies. “Place of death” was always a lie. “Cause of death” was usually a lie — “heart failure,” “pneumonia,” nothing at all — but sometimes the truth: “execution.” The line that was most likely to be true was the one that indicated the date of death. There was…