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. Examples are legion: the elaborate and emotional lit-de-parade of North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il; the slain body of Moamar Ghaddafi in a cold store by the market in Misrata before he was returned to his tribe; the debated disposal of Osama Bin Laden’s corpse in open sea; the mutilated bodies of victims of state terror in Syria, often filmed and circulated in trophy videos; the sometimes equally mutilated victims of drug cartels, paramilitaries and petty criminals in Latin America; the dead bodies of unidentified flood victims piling up outside the overfilled morgues in the
Japan, Germany, Poland and Korea) act as reminders that the Soviet capital was the scene not only of mass murders, but also of mass cremations, well before the ovens of the Nazi camps. The vast majority of corpses from the gulags, however, remain buried in the vicinity of the camps. And so, given that the camps were for the most part situated in the vicinity of urban conglomer ations, the map of the gulags precisely matches the map of the population of the Soviet Union. Yet in spite of the proximity between the Soviet population, the camps and their mass graves