Traumatic past buries hope for future

For many Russians, reforms mean not freedom but a slow implosion of life’s possibilities, writes Owen Matthews

SPRING 1989: A group of young students bends over their spades as they dig in a Siberian forest clearing.

In shallow depressions, they quickly uncover human remains, the skulls all neatly pierced by bullet holes, the work of Stalin’s executioners. All around the small group of diggers, dozens more mass graves stretch into the forest, extending, like the old Gulag Archipelago, from one end of the former Soviet Union’s 11 time zones to the other.