It was our first interview shoot for Coda Story’s Generation Gulag series and we were running late. Irina Verblovskaya, 86, was expecting us but our film crew couldn’t find her tiny green cottage hidden in a forest about half an hour outside St. Petersburg. Our minivan cruised down narrow roads until we got out and walked through the birch forest, stopping at almost identical cottage homes to ask for directions. When we finally pulled up to the right one, Irina made it clear how very late we were: “Why are you here?” she asked, raising her hands up and she walked towards us across the lawn. “What are you doing here now? Where were you 10 years ago?”

Were we too late? This was our first question at Coda when we began thinking about tracking down the remaining Gulag survivors. Why were we doing this now?

Irina Verblovskaya says she never thought she'd actually would serve time in the Gulags. Watch her story here.

From the very beginning our goal was not to create another oral history project about the Gulag. A library of documentary and nonfiction work on the Gulag already exists, though by no means extensive enough weighted against the scale of Soviet repressions. I was interested in a story happening now, in this era: I wanted to hear from the eyewitnesses of Soviet authoritarianism on what it is like to see their past being rewritten today. No one has ever been held accountable for running the Gulag, a system of forced labor camps integral to Soviet economic planning that imprisoned or exiled over 28 million people from 1918 to 1987. Instead, the Russian government is now airbrushing and glorifying its Soviet past.

This is a time of democratic backsliding around the world. A new generation of authoritarian leaders are interested in re-defining national identity and making sure history books serve their new political narratives. In China, the government campaigns to erase Uyghur people and their culture. In India, a punitive populist movement recasts India as a Hindu, rather than a secular, nation. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan eulogizes the country’s Ottoman history as he deploys troops to former Ottoman provinces like Libya and northern Syria.