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Former Gulag sites—operating theaters of terror during the Stalinist period—are scattered across western Siberia, where memories of the purges run deep. The camps represent some of the most horrific events of the Soviet past, and yet their current role is complicated. Focusing on three former prison camps, folklorist Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby untangles a surprising nexus of memory, legend, and vernacular religious practice afforded by the sacred springs located at each of these sites.

Grounded by detailed ethnography, Sacred Springs in the Camps explores how legend creates, negotiates, and challenges collective memory; how lived religious practices intersect with the current revival of the Russian Orthodox Church; how politics intertwine with belief; and how the social construction of sacred places affects folk narratives, faith, and local identity. These unlikely holy waters thus reflect important facets of contemporary Russian religion, politics, and society, refracting and reframing memories of the socialist past even as they offer important lessons for the present moment.

In 1987, Duluth, Minnesota, and Petrozavodsk, in what is now Russia, officially joined hands as sister cities. Douglas C. Nord tells the stories of their collaboration in the context of the late Cold War, covering in substantial detail the lived experiences of city officials, community leaders, academics, and average citizens who worked to bridge the divide between the United States and the Soviet Union. What circumstances supported or undermined efforts to conduct people-to-people diplomacy? What internal difficulties emerged, and how were they overcome? And what were the short-term effects and long-term consequences of the relationships forged in these postindustrial cities, across an ideological divide as deep and wide as the ocean that separated them?

Sister City Diplomacy offers a historical account of citizen diplomacy set in a unique political and social environment. But in its theoretical grounding and informed arguments, this study speaks to much broader and contemporary concerns, both in terms of United States–Russian relations today and with regard to the challenges and opportunities of community-based diplomacy in general. Lessons learned along the shores of Lakes Superior and Onega in the last days of the Cold War hold great value given the heightened tensions of current geopolitics.