Gulag: A History

As a fan of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his emotional, almost ranting narratives about the unnumbered innocents (and the few that were guilty) carted from Black Maria to interrogation (and if not summarily executed) to the gulag, I came out of both volumes of the "Gulag Archipelago" wanting to know more than just the angry anecdotal diatribes that Solzhenitsyn reiterates endlessly. I wanted facts, reasons, and perhaps an observer somewhat farther removed from the tragedy than Solzhenitsyn. I ordered Anne Applebaum's "Gulag" and really did not expect how definitive and comprehensive the book would be.

Applebaum deserves the Pulitzer, and so much more. The book is massive - from my desk I plowed through more than 500 pages over a week or so - and a reader needs a slow and deliberate morsel and bite digestion of each anecdote, fact, and chapter for the whole horror of the gulag system to be understood. To be quite frank, some of the stories are so shocking and disturbing that the quick deaths in Hitler's concentration camps seem merciful to the sometimes violent, sometimes inhumanly hollow and slow drudge towards death that many of these prisoners endured. There are moments in the book, especially the ones relating to children, that elicit more emotion than Elie Wiesel's "Night," and are frankly terrifying in comparison.

The book is well organized - Applebaum purposefully splits the development and the unraveling of the gulag system with all of the anecdotal issues of arrest, interrogation, criminals, political prisoners, work, sex, etc. By the time I was tiring of the history, the personal stories began, by the time I was tiring of personal stories, the history resumed and rushed to resolution.

The true tragedy is that so many of our youth traipse through college unaware of this story and still look to Soviet communism as some kind of slightly flawed utopia. The dead and living of "Gulag" cry out for the naive ones, begging them to reconsider.

With the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago" in the early 1970s, Alexander Solzhenitsyn shocked and dismayed the Western world by masterfully detailing the existence of a horrific shadow culture within the Soviet Union, a culture comprised of a mass society of slave laborers scratching out their bare-knuckled survival in unbelievable difficulty and squalor, and having been recruited into the Gulag for a variety of economic, social, and political reasons. Given the inherent limitations of this superb albeit shocking work, the West had to wait for the fall of the Soviet bloc for a more definitive and more complete treatise on the nature of the Gulag. This new book by scholar-turned-journalist Anne Applebaum represents such a work.

The work is both massive and comprehensive, dealing not only with the ways in which the Gulag came into existence and then thrived under the active sponsorship of Lenin and Stalin, but also with a plethora of aspects of life within the Gulag, ranging from its laws, customs, folklore, and morality on the one hand to its slang, sexual mores, and cuisine on the other. She looks at the prisoners themselves and how they interacted with each other to the relationships between the prisoners and the many sorts of guards and jailers that kept them imprisoned. For what forced the Gulag into becoming a more or less permanent fixture within the Soviet system was its value economically in producing goods and services that were marketable both within the larger Soviet economy as well as in international trade. As it does in China today, forced labor within the Gulag for the Soviets represented a key element in expanding markets for Soviet-made goods ranging from lamps to those prototypically Russian fur hats.

The Gulag came into being as a result of the Communist elite's burning desire for purges of remaining vestiges of bourgeoisie aspects of Soviet culture, and its consequent need for some deep dark hole to stick unlucky cultural offenders into to remove them semi-permanently from the forefront of the Soviet society. Stalin found it useful to expand the uses of the camp system to enhance industrial growth, and the camps became flooded with millions of Soviets found wanting in terms of their ultimate suitability for everyday life in the workers' paradise. Thus, the Gulag flourished throughout the 1920s and 1930s and even through the years of WWII, when slave labor provided an invaluable aid in producing enough war goods to help defeat the Axis powers. By the peak years of Gulag culture in the 1950s, the archipelago stretched into all twelve of the U.S. S. R.'s time zones, although it was largely concentrated in the northernmost and least livable aspects of the country's vast geographical areas.

One of the most interesting and certainly more controversial aspects of the book can be found in its consideration of the relative obscurity with which both the existence and horrors associated with the Gulag has been treated to date. Compared to the much more extensively researched and discussed Holocaust of Europe's Jewish population perpetrated by the Nazi Third Reich over a twelve year period, almost nothing is known about the nearly seventy reign of the Gulag. Given the fairly recent demise of the Soviet state, and the dawning availability of data revealing the particulars of the existence of the Soviet system of political imprisonment, forced labor camps, and summary executions, one expects this massively documented, exhaustively detailed, and memorably written work will serve as the standard in the field for decades to come. This is a terrific book, and one I can heartily recommend to any serious student of 20th century history. Enjoy!

Straight forward analysis of the workings of tyranny, not just soviet style-but anywhere. This history reveals the roots of the conflicts in todays Ukraine, Crimea and Chechnya. It is very revealing of the corruption of centralized, communistic government. It is a warning of what will re-occur because we ignore history.

With the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago" in the early 1970s, Alexander Solzhenitsyn shocked and dismayed the Western world by masterfully detailing the existence of a horrific shadow culture within the Soviet Union, a culture comprised of a mass society of slave laborers scratching out their bare-knuckled survival in unbelievable difficulty and squalor, and having been recruited into the Gulag for a variety of economic, social, and political reasons. Given the inherent limitations of this superb albeit shocking work, the West had to wait for the fall of the Soviet bloc for a more definitive and more complete treatise on the nature of the Gulag. This new book by scholar-turned-journalist Anne Applebaum represents such a work.

The work is both massive and comprehensive, dealing not only with the ways in which the Gulag came into existence and then thrived under the active sponsorship of Lenin and Stalin, but also with a plethora of aspects of life within the Gulag, ranging from its laws, customs, folklore, and morality on the one hand to its slang, sexual mores, and cuisine on the other. She looks at the prisoners themselves and how they interacted with each other to the relationships between the prisoners and the many sorts of guards and jailers that kept them imprisoned. For what forced the Gulag into becoming a more or less permanent fixture within the Soviet system was its value economically in producing goods and services that were marketable both within the larger Soviet economy as well as in international trade. As it does in China today, forced labor within the Gulag for the Soviets represented a key element in expanding markets for Soviet-made goods ranging from lamps to those prototypically Russian fur hats.

The Gulag came into being as a result of the Communist elite's burning desire for purges of remaining vestiges of bourgeoisie aspects of Soviet culture, and its consequent need for some deep dark hole to stick unlucky cultural offenders into to remove them semi-permanently from the forefront of the Soviet society. Stalin found it useful to expand the uses of the camp system to enhance industrial growth, and the camps became flooded with millions of Soviets found wanting in terms of their ultimate suitability for everyday life in the workers' paradise. Thus, the Gulag flourished throughout the 1920s and 1930s and even through the years of WWII, when slave labor provided an invaluable aid in producing enough war goods to help defeat the Axis powers. By the peak years of Gulag culture in the 1950s, the archipelago stretched into all twelve of the U.S. S. R.'s time zones, although it was largely concentrated in the northernmost and least livable aspects of the country's vast geographical areas.

One of the most interesting and certainly more controversial aspects of the book can be found in its consideration of the relative obscurity with which both the existence and horrors associated with the Gulag has been treated to date. Compared to the much more extensively researched and discussed Holocaust of Europe's Jewish population perpetrated by the Nazi Third Reich over a twelve year period, almost nothing is known about the nearly seventy reign of the Gulag. Given the fairly recent demise of the Soviet state, and the dawning availability of data revealing the particulars of the existence of the Soviet system of political imprisonment, forced labor camps, and summary executions, one expects this massively documented, exhaustively detailed, and memorably written work will serve as the standard in the field for decades to come. This is a terrific book, and one I can heartily recommend to any serious student of 20th century history. Enjoy!

Straight forward analysis of the workings of tyranny, not just soviet style-but anywhere. This history reveals the roots of the conflicts in todays Ukraine, Crimea and Chechnya. It is very revealing of the corruption of centralized, communistic government. It is a warning of what will re-occur because we ignore history.

This is a very important book. It is well-researched. The author takes large quantities of official records and first-hand accounts and meshes them together into something that the average person can comprehend.

Thank you Anne Applebaum for guiding me so meticulously through the hellish labyrinths of Soviet punishment system,which remained unknown to the Western World for a long time. I felt the shadow of my father, an inmate of Norilisk labor camp, projecting through your well researched work. I heard his voice through the testimonies of those who suffered in this no man's land of permanent frost because of their opposition to the Stalinist oppression. With your striking and fastidious description of the GULAG, you were able to bring down to the level of human imagination a reality beyond imagination. Thank you for the years you spent and the effort you put researching and writing this great path-blazing book.
Rubina Peroomian, Ph.D.

A superb book. Most interesting to learn in all details the history of the gulag. I fully recomend this masterwork of Anne Applebaum to those interested to to learn on this horrific episode of the twentieth century.

Anne Applebaum puts in a lot of effort and thought into this excellent history of the Soviet Gulag, which ended up costing the state billions and crushing the souls of millions of people. The Gulag did not spring up from nowhere - the tsars had long exiled trouble makers and criminals to remote parts of Russia. But under Lenin and then Stalin, a massive network of camps developed across the coldest swathes of the Arctic and the Far East. As Applebaum points out, unlike the Nazi death camps, the Gulag encampments were not specifically designed to kill people, although the tough conditions, poor level of medical care and inadequate food meant millions did in fact perish. The camps had three goals - isolate enemies of the regime, permanently populate remote areas, and produce gold, wood, metals, uranium and other valuable goods that could be sold abroad. In fact, as Applebaum shows, the camp system never came close to even breaking even, and gobbled up scarce resources and manpower at times of crisis such as famines and the start of World War Two. Time and time again, camp commandants complained that the new arrivals - shipped across the world's largest country in appalling conditions - were in no fit state to chop down trees and dig for gold. Applebaum makes a couple of important points. Although most of the memoirs from Gulag survivors were written by artists and intellectuals, the vast majority of prisoners were ill-educated peasants, and their stories went largely unheard. And unlike post-war Germany, which went through endless rounds of self-introspection and apologies and efforts to offer penance, no one really discussed the camps after the system was shut down, since to do so would underline the criminal nature of the Soviet state.

The writer claims ignorant from the younger generation about the past. Well, I did not fully learned about the past till in my 20"s. One might as why? No one talked about it in fair that they will be deported for work to the Gulag or prisoned. It isn't ignorant, it is moving on. Most Europeans move on don't dwell on the past like American do. There is a huge cultural difference. As a Hungarian with family members whom were among the 600 000 that was taken to the Gulag I have found the book way too short on stories about other nationals. The number that were in the book might be large, but far from the truth. About 8% of the population was taken just form Hungary between 1956-1984 when the "gulag" supposably existed differently. If I were a historic writer, I would have written about the Gulag in more details not just about how it has effected Russia, but how it has effected all eastern block countries. Since thats not the case here, I would have named the book The Gulag in Russia. I love history and this was one of the most disappointing books that I have ever read about past events that I have a great knowledge due to living in it.

Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History is a gripping, thorough, and harrowing account of the Soviet Union’s immense prison system. The organization of the book is itself interesting. The first section of the book discusses the origin of the camps and how they grew semi-organically from post-1917 political repression, eventually becoming an important part of the Soviet economy. The second and longest section describes day-to-day life in the camps, mostly but not entirely from the perspective of prisoners. The third section discusses the history of the camps from the Second World War to their decline after Stalin’s death and eventual disbandment in the 1980s under Gorbachev.

It is impossible to read Applebaum’s account of the camps without imagining oneself struggling - and likely failing - to survive inside of them. The narrative features objective, almost journalistic history from Applebaum, punctuated by moving testimonials of camp victims. The combination of Applebaum’s detached prose and the abject suffering conveyed in the first-person accounts is devastating. Applebaum must be among the most effective non-fiction writers alive today.

The portrait of the Gulag that emerges is of a system that suffered from a combination of outright sadism and simple mismanagement. The unifying theme is an utter lack of concern or recognition of the humanity of the prisoners/victims. Some interesting/especially affecting aspects are:

- The economic role of the Gulag. The Gulag was the country’s - and the world’s - largest employer during much of Stalin’s reign. Workers in the Gulag mined coal, gold, and uranium, constructed roads and canals, designed airplanes, and built factories and nuclear power plants. Stalin in particular appears to have been personally obsessed with the economics of the Gulag, and was determined to make the camps “profitable” (they never were). At times, NKVD (secret police) agents were given quotas for people to arrest, apparently in order to meet industrial production targets.

- The scale of the Gulag. All told, on the order of 20 million people passed through the Gulag over the years. Peak camp population was probably around 2 million. Entire regions of the USSR were built and settled by prisoners.

- The lives of women and children in the camps. It is hard to pick a single chapter of the Gulag that stands out as the most difficult to read, but if I had to, it would be the chapter on pregnancy and childbirth. Applebaum also discusses homosexuality in the camps.

- The use of the Gulag for ethnic cleansing. While I was somewhat aware of the Gulag as a tool of political repression and state terror, I did not realize how Stalin also used the Gulag to ethnically cleanse the USSR of unwanted groups. The result of these ethnic purges was a diverse camp population. Applebaum documents the role of minority/nationalist factions within the camps. It should be pointed out that, unlike Hitler’s camps, the Gulag concentration camps were not “death camps”.

- Applebaum repeatedly uses the Gulag as a synecdoche for the USSR as a whole, especially its maladministration, absurd bureaucracy, lack of concern for human rights, and reliance on terror to maintain control. The book emphasizes the sometimes-blurred lines between prisons and the rest of the population.

Gulag is a difficult read, but also a necessary and timely one. As Russia begins to assert a kind of Neo-Soviet nationalism (under the leadership of a former KGB agent) and anti-democratic movements gain strength around the world, the story of the camps grows in importance as well.

Reading the book, I could not help but remember that the United States currently has the largest incarcerated population in the world, and one of the highest incarceration rates. It is not fair to compare the Gulag to prisons in the United States, which do not contain political prisoners, operate according to the rule of law, and treat prisoners far, far better. On the other hand, holding so many citizens behind bars is a sure sign of a sick and unjust society. The “camp-industrial complex” of the USSR in particular draws a parallel to today’s “prison-industrial complex” in the US.

This is a tremendous study. Very well written and incorporating the latest research, Applebaum's "GULAG" is the best modern source of information on the subject. Not exactly an easy read... My stomach was constantly turning from the horrors and sheer hopelessness experienced by the victims, but I just couldn't stop listening.

One minor gripe... The person who reads the book distorted every single Russian name, place or term so that it was absolutely unrecognizable. I speak Russian and know a lot of the places and the names referenced, as well as the slang and terms used by Applebaum. It was very frustrating that most of them were screwed up so badly. It's almost like the person who was reading the book went to an extra length to distort all the names and deliberately changed all "ch" sounds to "k" and so on.

The Soviet Gulag was intended for profit. That incredible statement strips any brackets surrounding the depth of incredulity that this book describes. Begun in the twenties, the Gulag was a two-headed scheme to rid the Soviet Union of undesirables and utilize them for the enrichment of the state and decidedly not the populace. Stalin would decree, ‘We need a bridge. Tell the NKVD to arrest some engineers.’ Then he might think there was an arctic oil field in need of exploitation so he ordered the arrest of geologists. When he saw vast, empty steppes yielding nothing to the state, he ordered the forced relocation of entire cultures forcing the deportees to productively use the wasteland or die in failing to do so. Perhaps most unbelievably, he proclaimed: ‘We need to go into outer space, arrest some scientists.’ Despite Stalin’s mania for forced labor, he actually set quotas for how many prisoners were to be shot each month and criticized camp commandants for failing to meet them. Anne Applebaum has, in the rarified light of Russian willingness to open at least some archives, spent decades unearthing the magnitude of the Soviet Gulag system’s misuse of capital, resources and humanity. The fact that slave labor never, ever showed a profit did not convince the Soviets, from Stalin through Gorbachev, to quit the concept, despite their own proof that it was a failed theory.

Gulag is a chilling history lesson that clarifies the nature of America’s wartime ally. It also defines the wrongness, incompetence and total futility of the Soviet system, and by extension, communism and socialism. The reader will be stunned by the immensity of the Gulag, its incomprehensible cruelty, ineptitude and the capriciousness with which it was run. Finally, Anne Applebaum’s insight into how the Gulag was ultimately responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union is an eye-opening hypothesis. This massive work is highly readable and entertaining as well as informative.

Page 102 (my book) from Stalin and Beria
"an enemy of the people is not only one who commits sabotage, but one who doubts the rightness of the Party line."... women were arrested as "wives of enemies of the people" and the same applied to children.

Page 241 Vladimir Bukovsky
"In our camps, you were expected not only to be a slave laborer, but to sing and smile while you worked as well. They didn't just want to oppress us; they wanted us to thank them for it."

This is a book that is horrific in scope as it details the history of the Gulag in the Soviet Union from its beginnings under Lenin.

The author, who writes with great eloquence, takes us through the various stages of what occurred. The Gulag itself was a vast slave labour system that had two basic purposes: to incarcerate anyone who was perceived as a threat to the system and to use the slave labourers (the prisoners) to industrialize and modernize the Soviet Union - to build roads and railroads, work in mines, chop down trees for lumber - in other words to exploit the almost endless resources of the country.

Ms. Applebaum takes us through the entire sequence of events: the arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, transport to a camp, and the camp itself. Millions passed through this system, some more than once.

When examined individually these steps could be compared to imprisonment in other countries - for instance the food is atrocious. But it is the vast scale of the Gulag that sets it apart - not only in terms of human dignity, but as a crime against there own citizens. One aspect that is beyond the compare is the transport to the labour camps. Many would die during this long journey to the outer reaches of the Soviet Union where they could be locked in cattle cars or the bottom of ships and given little food and clothing. Many of the prisons were in the far north where the prisoners were forced to work long hours in the cold with inadequate clothing and small rations, even in the summer they were decimated by hordes of mosquitoes.

Of interest is that the camps were controlled by the Russian mob which has a long history, as they started in the days of the Czar. These real criminals held brutal sway over the political prisoners. The number and types of prisoners were vast - "political" prisoners, exiles (as in a national group relocated for ethnic cleansing) consisting over the years of Poles, Lithuanians, Chechens, religious people, kulaks... One is never quite sure of the distinction between an exile and prisoners - in remote locations neither, due to geography, had freedom of movement. Maybe prisoners had an advantage because they were fed, usually with a bowl of watery soup.

Page 421 in 1939
With no warning, the NKVD had plucked these newcomers - Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Moldavians - out of their bourgeois or peasant worlds after the Soviet invasion of multiethnic eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and the Baltic States, and dumped them in large numbers, into the Gulag and exile villages.

What is most sad and atrocious is the treatment of the children (which I dare say was even worse than the way women were treated). They were at the bottom of the ladder in a "society" where work was rewarded with food.

Page 333
Decades of propaganda, of posters draped across orphanage walls, thanking Stalin "for our happy childhood", failed to convince the Soviet people that the children of the camps, the children of the streets, and the children of the orphanages had ever become anything but full-fledged members of the Soviet Union's large and all-embracing criminal class.

Ms. Appleton humanizes all with emotional quotes from several people, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov. The author discusses how the Gulag changed after Stalin. For instance, during the Brezhnev era Joseph Brodsky (a poet) was arrested and imprisoned on charges of "parasitism".

This book furthered my understanding of the Soviet Union and its' successor Russia. This is not a book of numbers. It is intense and extremely well written. We are provided not just with a history of the Gulag, but of the entire country. Highly recommended for any who are interested in this important historical era. As the author mentions, it gives us another view of the Cold War - and why there was a Cold War.

Page 515 Olga Adamo-Sliozberg arrested in 1936 - released in 1956
"There was no one home and finally I was able to weep freely.
To weep for my husband, who perished in the cellars of the Lubyanka, when he was thirty-seven years old, at the height of his powers and talent; for my children, who grew up orphans, stigmatized as the children of enemies of the people; for my parents, who died of grief; for Nikolai who was tortured in the camps; and for all of my friends who never lived to be rehabilitated but lie beneath the frozen earth of Kolyma."

Upon reading the opening pages of the first chapter, I found myself highlighting nearly every line. Why? Because so much of the rhetoric used by the early Soviet regime is used today. The most frightening words used by the early Soviets to describe a new criminal element: "enemy of the revolution," and "class enemy." This bears striking resemblance to the Occupy crowd, with their chants of "we are the 99%." Expressing the feared label so closely related to that used by the Soviets, those who are not among the 99%, are "class enemies." This is not to diminished the concerns of the Occupy movement which indeed had some, albeit abstract, legitimate grievances. But the work brilliantly shows the frightening side of being on the receiving end of the labels: "enemy of the revolution" and "class enemy." If anything, this work shows that arbitrary and groundless labeling of individuals, can lead to terrifying and disastrous consequences. In terms of Soviet Russia, it was done in the name of creating Marx's and Lenin's vision of a workers paradise.

Jesus Christ. With the possible exception of a few books on the Holocaust, this is the single most painful work of non-fiction I've ever encountered. The portrait of the Soviet work camp system that Applebaum develops examines, in painfully minute detail, every single aspect of life in and around the Gulag system, from the highest levels of Soviet politburo administration, down to the lowliest starving, walking damned in the most far flung Siberian penal cell. And she brings a staggering deluge of historical records and personal testimonies from people involved at all levels of the Gulag system to bare witness and de-mystify what was for decades an almost completely hidden world.

And what a nightmare of a world it all was, all the more so because the criminal unfairness of the whole enterprise was never mandated, never required, never written into laws or decrees in any way, they just didn't care at all what really happened to all of these people they arrested for nothing and charged with nothing and shunted around the Russian wastes and sent to dig limestone out the arctic with their bare hands with no shelter or warm clothing...

In some ways, and I doubt Applebaum intended this, this is a work of supreme political nihilism. It doesn't merely call into question the practical ramifications of the ideology of the soviet union/socialism, it calls into question the entire concept of sane, humane governance in the modern age period. As long as something this crushingly atrocious is able to sustain itself for decades on end, how can we possibly have faith in anything that any national entity ever does?

An excellent compendium of the various individual accounts that have been published. She puts them together in a single narrative that seems very thorough. Good writing, engaging, clear, and she brings you along.

With Russia again at the forefront of American consciousness, this is a very helpful and timely book. The writing isn't riveting, but the history of the Gulag is presented in a methodical, disciplined and thorough way. Through it you get a window into 20th century Russian history and an explanation for where things are today.

The epilogue is worth the time spent reading the book. Applebaum lands her punch. If we dehumanize our enemies we dehumanize ourselves.

This is a masterpiece of the history of the Gulag slave labor camps in Siberia. Recommended to all who want to know more about the terror camps created by Stalin in the Soviet Union. Only hardened criminals and those who could get enough to eat survived in sub human captivity. Political prisoners ("enemies of the people") were especially prone to death by starvation for failure to meet productivity goals, and camp administrators did little to keep them alive when they were too weak to work. Other despots have used similar slave labor camps, including Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot. North Korea has one of the most brutal camp systems even today when death by starvation is inevitable.

GULAG is an acronym of the Russian words Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei. Literally, in English, it means Main Camp Administration but on a broader scale Gulag became known as the Soviet sytems of slave labor, referring to all of their camps, from concentration camps to punishment camps and even children's camps. Ms. Applebaum makes a very good point in her introduction, as she explains that "to many people, the crimes of Stalin do not inspire the same visceral reaction as the crimes of Hitler" despite the fact that during the years of Stalin's reign, millions more suffered than the numbers killed by the German concentration camps. Every once in a while, I find myself drawn to a nonfiction book and this one caught my attention and held it from beginning to end as I learned about the atrocities that affected nearly every Russian living during this time period. If they were not personally enslaved in one of the work camps, they knew someone who had been. People were arrested for the most minor crimes and offenses in order to fill the camps with working bodies to maintain the high level of production demanded by their superiors. Those imprisoned suffered from starvation and exhaustion to the point where many reports of self-mutilation were recorded in an effort to earn themselves a vacation in the camp hospital, where rest and higher rations of food were available. There is so much information in this book I can hardly imagine the amount of time involved in preparing it. I was very impressed not only with Ms. Applebaum's knowledge but also her ability to portray many different aspects of the camps, giving the reader an inside look at a system that should only exist on paper.

Anne Applebaum's deeply moving human document brushes a raw picture of an, unfortunately, often recurring human tragedy: the use of slave labor in `work' camps, here in their soviet version.
The Gulag system reflected the whole political and social climate in the USSR. The State was a big prison zone and the camps the small ones.
The system was an integral part of the soviet regime. Its role was to speed up industrialization and to excavate natural resources in barely habitable places. There were camps near gold, coal and nickel mines, near chemical, metal-processing, fish canning and electricity plants, near public works (airports, highways, water ways, apartment blocks) and that all over the country.

History
The gulag system was founded after the October 1917 revolution and came under the control of the secret service in 1929. Another pivotal year was 1937, the beginning of the Great Terror, when Stalin imposed quotas for indiscriminate arrests and executions beginning with the CP hierarchy. There was a partial amnesty during WW II, but the inmates were sent in the front line. After Stalin's death, the system was dismantled, but the camps continued to be used for common criminals and as `reeducation' centers for dissidents.

Who were the inmates?
There was always a mixture of common and `political' criminals.
In the beginning, the political inmates were `counter-revolutionaries', members of the non-Bolshevik revolutionary socialist parties. Afterwards, they were mostly peasants (after the collectivization), national minorities, CP and even Gulag officials (during the Great Terror), prisoners of war (during and after the war) and dissidents.
A total of about 30 million people passed through the camps, of which about 10 % died.

Why?
Except the common criminals, people were arrested for what they were, not for what they had done. Their - avowed or not - crimes were imaginary and nonsensical.

The system
Every camp has to be profitable; of course, they weren't.
They were generally run by dump and corrupt bureaucrats, who had absolutely no respect for individual lives. The working practices were very bad.
After three weeks people were turned into wild animals, fighting a naked struggle for survival in an overcrowded world of stench, vermin, filth, promiscuity, prostitution, epidemics, hunger, revolting food, informants, self-mutilation, murders, suicides, punishment cells, tortures and deaths by exhaustion. The `normal' inmates were terrorized by common criminal bands.
After release, the psychological and social integration into the big prison zone was extremely difficult.

Russia as a country has still not digested its past: `Society is indifferent to the crimes of the past, because so many people participated in them.' `Former communists have a clear interest in concealing the past.'

Anne Applebaum illustrates all aspects of Gulag life and its dehumanization process with moving tragic individual fates.
This book is a must read for all those interested in the history of mankind. `The more we are able to understand the specific circumstances which led to mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature.'

The debate over which was worse-- Hitler's regime or Stalin's-- is sterile and often obscene, as it counts the dead by the millions to score partisan points. But as I read Gulag, I found it hard not to think that the Soviet system was the greater horror-- yes, Nazism and the Holocaust were more bloodthirsty, more obviously Satanic, but the compensating factor is that after a certain delay the world roused itself to destroy it. Evil was recognized and stopped, after a while. Where the Gulag, and the state for which the Gulag was merely all principles taken to their logical conclusion, was allowed to run for decades as if it were a rational system--a system which still has its apologists and even admirers.

The central feature of the Gulag is its utter utilitarianism-- if it was easier for wave after wave after prisoners to dig uranium with bare hands and be replaced as they died of radiation poisoning, it was done that way. Unlike with the Nazis, the policy wasn't explicitly to work people to death, but the policies that did exist accepted working them to death as a natural by-product and of no consequence. Academics and undergraduates who think industrial capitalism "dehumanizes" the worker should read this just to see how deeply dehumanizing an industrial system in non-democratic societies can truly become; they simply have no idea. The flip side of all that is that because the Soviet system was so dictatorial, so riddled with fear (it was easy enough for camp officials to become prisoners the next day, and even the reverse was not unknown), it was a completely incompetent and corrupt system incapable of accomplishing even a fraction of what it was supposed to do. Canals were dug at heroic and tragic cost where they were completely unnecessary (and remain unused to this day). Criminal gangs ran the prisons. Children were taken to orphanages and who their parents were was lost in the paperwork. Mass graves were filled with the unknown dead who, given the nature of the frozen tundra, are still being spat up by the ground, preserved but nameless, to this day.

It is impossible to read Gulag and not feel that these horrors were the inevitable consequences of the Soviet system; the gulag was not an aberration of Marxism-Leninism but rather the end to which all its philosophy and practices naturally and inescapably led.

A reviewer has to acknowledge Anne's political and personal affiliations. She is married to the foreign minister of Poland (as of this time) and currently being criticized for her part in protesting the arrest of Roman Polanski. This book is well researched and mostly free from her biases. Anyone can read them in her book but she tries to not let her biases in and when she does she is quick to acknowledge them. There is no such thing and an unbiased report, her acknowledgement of this is important. The book itself is a wonderful introduction of the entire history of the Gulag system. It is overly long and general, but this has to be expected when someone writes about a nearly 150 year old system. The Primary sources in this book are great, and she make sure to acknowledge dissent where there is in these sources, leaving it up to the reader to make the decision on who is right. The use of primary sources also provides a personal individual tone to the book that is needed to keep the reader engrossed in such a long book. She is a journalist and so has little understanding of the theory and analysis of other disciplines, that is noticeable through the work. This is a weakness but not a complete detraction, which leaves this book a wonderful read for the layman, and a good one for academicians.

The author shows a comprehensive knowledge of the history of gulags, but for goodness sake, perhaps it could be made into a more interesting or compelling narrative. Perhaps the Pulitzer is becoming politicized like the Nobel Peace Prize - and perhaps this book won it because it was the unveiling of a previously covered-up human tragedy. But it's boring and highly detailed.

I liked Applebaum's book, first of all, for clearly systematizing the vast GULAG - related materials available to date. And even though the book is emotionally difficult to read, the clarity of Applebaum's style and her obvious empathy with the material help along. In addition, I have always especially valued authors' own response to the subjects of their books, which is rather rare in non-fiction. Refreshingly, in the introduction and the last few chapters, Applebaum offers her own take on issues ranging from the number of GULAG prisoners to the unfortunate lack of awareness about GULAG today.

But no less important, and unfortunately not sufficiently explored in this clever and factual book, is a consideration of the human condition, aided perhaps by historic and cultural circumstance, that led to the mushrooming of this vast and atrocious system. Applebaum starts tackling the issue by suggesting that the main reason behind GULAG's existence was economic benefit. Stalin believed in slave labor. The country had vast natural resources in the climatically harsh remote regions, that it vitally needed for rapid economic growth. Hence the system of concentration camps that delivered both. This convincing explanation seems, however, incomplete. It does not account for the guard that would not let literally dying of thirst prisoners collect rainwater into their mugs, nor for the commissars working day and night wringing confessions in non-existing crimes from hundreds of thousands of innocent people, nor does it account for the repression of the families of those labeled "enemies of the people". Applebaum admits that many such workings of the Soviet State are hard to understand.

The fish rots from the head. Undoubtedly, Stalin himself was the engine of much atrocity. His values are well represented by his 1937 messages to local NKVD in which he specified the percentages of each province population he wanted dead. Stalin's monstrous bent on mass murder may be a part of his character with which he was born. Or he may have developed it as overcompensation for his physical shortcomings and lack of talents. But it seems that this unrestrained evil blossomed because of the policies of the Russian State at the time. These policies appear to be the main building blocks of GULAG.

The sprawling GULAG system, with thousands of camps and some 18 million people that passed through it, could not have existed if it were not an inherent part of the State. The system of Russian concentration camps was started before Stalin got to the helm (with over 100 camps in 1920, when Lenin was alive and well), and operated well after Stalin's death (until 1986). Soviet Russia defined itself as the product of class struggle. The idea of history as class struggle, proposed by Marx, became the country's new religion. Moreover, not only was this theory used to explain history, but the country's new history was made according to this theory: class struggle had to be created and perpetuated to prove the wisdom of the dogma. Marx and Lenin laid the groundwork for this process by claiming that vast groups of people had to be declared enemies of the workers and peasants according to the new sociological law they uncovered. The new Soviet State was quite imaginative in choosing the subsections of the population to declare enemies: relatively better-off peasants, foreigners, minorities, people who were late for work etc. When they ran out of obvious choices, they just invented numerous "plots" and "spy networks" and tortured false confessions out of innocent people (acting on the State doctrine that confession trumps all evidence and on Stalin's 1937 memo approving torture). Dealing with individuals that were unpleasant to the state was disarmingly simple: it was sufficient to label someone as part of an "enemy" group. Then the conviction followed automatically based on the state dogma. Declaring a group to be hostile to the Soviet social order and an individual to be part of that group was at the heart of the Soviet State and followed directly from the cornerstone of Marxism.

GULAG could not have existed without the spirit of intolerance to "others", fanned by the Party rhetoric. Lenin, rabidly intolerant of any disagreement with his own views, openly called for being ruthless to the enemies of Bolsheviks. He believed in terror. Robespierre was his hero and NKVD was his guillotine. Intolerance and ruthlessness were at the heart of GULAG's development into the system of slave labor and death, and formed the basis for the repression of the inmates' families.

GULAG could not have existed without great indifference to human suffering and disregard for human life on the part of authorities. Perhaps, in part it was a natural occurrence in the society that operated in larger than life slogans ("The Party and People are One") and in which individual was always secondary to the plans of "the Party and the State". The country's ideals were inanimate notions (such as "Socialist Labor" or "Bright Future") An individual life was never one of them.

GULAG could not have existed in a country with any semblance of a legal system. Until 1922, the new Soviet Russia did not even have a Criminal Code. And in 1937, the chief law officer of the USSR, Vyshinsky, argued that prosecutors should not feel limited by the letter of law, or even by their intellect, but should use their "party intuition" to detect the enemy. Usually, there were no investigations or hearings. Until 1938, the person was sentenced by a "troika" (which was presided by the chief of the local NKVD), without as much as pretence of a due process.

GULAG could not have existed without collaboration of tens of thousands of people. Propaganda played a big role in recruiting them. Bolsheviks knew the value of propaganda. One of the main reasons that they got to power in 1917 was their use of propaganda to cajole Russian solders to join them. Their high regard for propaganda led them to outlaw all opposition press only two days after they succeeded in the military coup. The new Soviet State gave the world dictionaries the word "agitprop" and with it the idea of the propaganda party offices throughout the country. In addition, GULAG's administration and support personnel were not trained in critical thinking: for example, in 1945 75% of them had no education beyond primary school. They presented a greenfield material for the State propaganda.

The book does not have the immediacy of the first-hand experience or the liveliness of GULAG Archipelago, but is an engaging and systematic overview of what we know about GULAG today.

Starvation and disease and forced labor in Marxist USSR and the PRC
by Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung destroyed at least
120 million lives in a single Century. DEMOCIDE is a 200 year old French word
that is by definition the murder of fellow human beings and citizens
in peacetime. Nothing in the history of mankind has been or even is,
more deadly than Marxism in all its guises. Nothing.
And that includes the history of fascism and/or religion.
It is the most closely guarded open historical secret in the
liberal Western 21 st Century.

What's Right

National Review

May 5, 2003, Monday

By David Frum

A Must-Read

If you're going to write books for a living, you have to make up your mind not to pay any attention to reviews of your work. But I doubt that I will ever manage to feel indifferent to reviews of my friends' books -- especially not to one as peevishly ungenerous as The New Yorker's review (dated April 14) of Anne Applebaum's new book, Gulag: A History.

I read Gulag in galleys a few weeks ago. It is, simply, a titanic achievement: learned and moving and profound. Gulag is the first book in English to compile the whole mass of knowledge about the Soviet prison-camp system. That system was created within weeks of the inauguration of the Soviet state, in 1917, and it lasted as long as the Soviet Union itself. In all, perhaps as many as 18 million people passed through its camps. And yet, even now, the Gulag is not well understood in the West.

The New Yorker review goes to some lengths to deny this lack of understanding. It is written by David Remnick, the magazine's editor and himself the author of a fine book about modern Russia, Lenin's Tomb. Remnick insists that we already knew all we needed to know about the Gulag. And it's true that since the 1970s, if not before, the principal facts about the Gulag have been available to those who wished to avail themselves of them. But how few of us did wish to! I'd guess that the proportion was even tinier amongst the sort of people who read and write for magazines like The New Yorker.

The Gulag was the Soviet Union. We may imagine inmates chopping trees, like Ivan Denisovich, or digging for gold in Kolyma. They were equally likely to be found constructing apartment blocks in Moscow or making toys or canning fish. The Nazi camps were death camps, intended to murder; any industrial contribution they might make to the German war effort was incidental at best. The Soviets, by contrast, built their economy on a foundation of slave labor -- the first modern society to try such a thing since the Confederacy, with the difference that any Soviet citizen could be reduced to slavery at any moment.

No reader will easily forget Applebaum's vivid accounts of the horrible human suffering of the Gulag: the hunger and frostbite, the lonely, disregarded deaths, the sadism and exploitation, the mothers snatched on the street without so much as a final goodbye to their families, the orphaned children dying of cold and starvation and neglect, the fear and mistrust felt between those who were randomly spared and those who were almost as randomly seized.

But Applebaum is ultimately interested less in the Gulag's horror than its creators' motives. We today may look back on the camp era and see only waste: Stalin's "preposterous public-works projects," as Remnick calls them. But that's not how it seemed to many at the time. At the time, many Westerners paid tribute to the Soviet Union's achievements -- its mighty dams and railways, its cities in the Arctic circle and vast farms of irrigated grain. Even anti-Communists like Richard Crossman, editor of The God That Failed, paid tribute to the "terrifying efficiency" of the Soviet economy: Liberated from petty concerns like profit and loss and cost-accounting, the Soviets could do things that no capitalist society would ever dare attempt. Andrei Amalrik, in his Notes of a Revolutionary, recalls Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau's visit to the Siberian city of Norilsk. Trudeau lamented that Canada had never succeeded in building so large a city so far north -- unaware, or unconcerned, that Norilsk had been built by prisoners.

Any decent person can recognize the inhumanity and cruelty of the Gulag (though as a matter of record, a remarkable number of people who considered themselves decent managed to avoid recognizing it when it counted). But what Applebaum emphasizes, as nobody before her has done, is the Gulag's sheer stupid pointlessness.

Who would set prisoners to work digging an unnecessary canal from the White Sea to the Baltic using only hand tools? How could anybody imagine that starving slaves could outproduce American factories? Were the Soviets crazy?

Applebaum does not answer this question directly -- but she provides the evidence for the reader to find the answer for himself. The Soviets were not crazy. They believed that society's wealth consisted in something called the "surplus value" of the worker's labor. In a capitalist society, the capitalist stole that surplus value. In the Communist fairyland of tomorrow, the worker would keep the surplus for his own benefit. In the meantime, Marxian theory suggested, the emerging socialist state could develop by appropriating for itself the surplus value that had previously enriched the capitalist. And if the worker could be forced to eat less, to live in a barracks instead of a house, to wear rags rather than clothes -- why then the surplus would be even bigger, and the state would advance even faster, and the Communist fairyland would arrive even sooner.

It all made a terrible sense -- that is, if you accepted the crackpot economics on which the plan rested. In other words, just as Solzhenitsyn traced the responsibility for the creation of the Gulag back from Stalin to Lenin, so Applebaum follows the path all the way back to Das Kapital. She shows us that the Gulag is not just an incident in the history of Russia. It is the culmination of the history of socialism.

This searing insight is naturally disturbing to those for whom socialism remains a sentimental attachment. For them, Applebaum's great book will indeed be a disturbing experience -- and you can see why The New Yorker might wish to protect them from it by allowing it no greater value than as a kind of reminder notice to read something else. "[I]f Applebaum's Gulag leads more readers to Solzhenitsyn then her book will have served an important function." True enough. But it's also true that Solzhenitsyn should lead readers to Applebaum -- a writer whose courage and originality live up to the standards set by the master himself.

This is an extremely well researched and superbly written book!

Author Anne Applebaum does a stellar job in discussing all aspects of the Soviet Union's notorious GULAG (concentration camps). She utilizes Russian archival sources and personalizes them with the memoirs of camp survivors as well as dozens and dozens of interviews.

According to Applebaum, almost 30 million Soviet citizens were arrested between 1930 and 1953 and sentenced to suffer in the GULAGs. Almost 3 million were executed. Many more were beaten to death or died from starvation, overwork, exposure, suicide and sickness.

Large numbers of common Soviet citizens were arrested and sentenced simply because the regime needed their particular expertise or their labor to better exploit the natural and mineral resources of the Soviet Union's remote northern and far eastern regions. Indeed, it was slave labor, on a massive scale, that transformed the Soviet Union through the large-scale construction of roads, bridges, towns, cities, and industry in the country's most remote regions.

The end result is an unparalleled look at life and death in Stalin's death camps. The GULAG forever scarred the souls of the tens of millions of Soviet (and non-Soviet) men, women, and children that survived their sentences and continues to influence everyday life in Putin's Russia.

"The old Stalinist division between "enemies" lives on in the new Russian elite's arrogant contempt for its fellow citizens," concludes Applebaum. "Unless that elite soon comes to recognize the value and the importance of all of Russia's citizens, to honor both their civil and their human rights, Russia is ultimately fated to become today's northern Zaire, a land populated by impoverished peasants and billionaire politicians who keep their assets in Swiss bank vaults and their private jets on runways, engines running."

This is an excellent, comprehensive story of the Soviet Gulag camp system from the 1920s through the 1980s. Applebaum drew extensively on Soviet archival research and on prisoner memoirs to write "Gulag." The product is a well-written, interesting history of an evil system.

At the beginning of "Gulag," Applebaum wrote that the catalyst for this work was the realization that, while most people universally abhor Nazi symbols, people collect Soviet symbols and trinkets as souvenirs. Everyone knows about the Nazi concentration and extermination camps, but few people know about the evils that were perpetrated by Soviet communism in the Gulag system. Ms. Applebaum successfully shows the evil, demoralizing Gulag system.

The book is organized into three sections: the first tells the chronological history of the early (pre-World War II) years of the Gulag; the second gives a topical overview of life in the camps; and the third traces the history of the camps from World War II through the death of Stalin and to their complete demise in the 1980s. Chapters in the second part focus on the arrests, imprisonment and interrogation, work and life, women and children, and even rebellion and escape in the camps. Applebaum shows the breadth and depth of the system, and by relying on a wide variety of memoirs, shows that for every generalization she can draw about life for the millions in the camps, there were always exceptions. She also shows how much of the impetus for the camps was economic - the Soviet leaders believed that the camps were producing more than they were costing - but that this belief, like the overall Soviet system, was built on a foundation of manipulated figures and outright lies.

Readers already familiar with the Gulag through books such as "The Gulag Archipelago" will not be surprised by anything in this book. But Applebaum's book, drawing on such a wide variety of sources, gives a more complete picture of the huge Gulag system throughout its entire existence.

Anne Applebaum raises an excellent point at the beginning of "Gulag": Why aren't the horrors of the Soviet Union's prison system better known or acknowledged as among the worst atrocities of human history? Perhaps the answer to that question would make for a compelling sequel to this book. But admirably Applebaum keeps a very tight rein on the ideological battles that rage in Russian studies (see other reviews!) and sticks to the facts-many of which a nonspecialist would have no access to in such detail before this book. As a child who was lucky enough to encounter "The Endless Steppe" at an impressionable age, I was grateful to find such a nonpolemical and graceful introduction to this topic. This book is comprehensive and well structured, and free of the jargon and awkward writing that afflicts many histories. Applebaum also allows for some lyricism when writing about the landscapes of the Russian Far East and the doomed romances between prisoners-although she usually lets the facts and the prisoners' own words speak for themselves. Don't be put off by the grim cover and daunting heft of this book: it's a great read.

Having read dozens of books on the Holocaust over the years, I was surprised at how emotionally draining I found this book. Statistics are inevitable in this subject - and also important: past disputes over the numbers of Stalin's dead (for example by Robert Conquest and his detractors) had to be fought. But Applebaum takes us beyond the numbers into the heartbreaking stories of the individual victims. Making extensive, but not uncritical use, of survivors' memoirs, she brings the horrors of the Gulag into distressingly sharp focus.

She also proffers some possible explanations for the Gulag system beyond merely asserting that Stalin was an evil paranoiac (which he undoubtedly was). I was interested to learn, for example, quite how strong the economic motive was for turning hundreds of thousands of innocent people into slave labourers. Stalin and the senior Bolsheviks saw this as a perfectly legitimate way of rapidly developing remote and primitive parts of the Russian hinterland.

I now wait, no doubt in vain, for one of the many surviving Western defenders of the Soviet system to admit their grotesque willful blindness and to apologise to its millions of victims.

This is a well-written and comprehensive history of the GULAG. Counter to some of the other reviewers' complaints, I would point out that Applebaum doesn't claim to have an accurate count of the number who died. She makes clear that you have to be specific when you ask "how many?": whether dead in the camps or as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution and all that came after, the number of dead is almost impossible to determine accurately. She also doesn't pretend to speak for all of the classes of society that ended up in the GULAG. She notes that illiterate peasants, criminals, and, naturally, those who didn't survive, didn't leave memoirs to go by. The degradation and horror of the camps is bad enough, what struck me as even worse is the idea of all the anonymous innocents who perished in the senseless meatgrinder of the GULAG. She does a wonderful job of getting that across.

Only one complaint, and that is that she seems to have had a blind spot when it comes to the stories of Catholics,especially priests, caught in the GULAG. The destruction of Orthodox priests and believers is also passed over very lightly. The animosity of the communists to Christians is not much mentioned, instead the focus is more on their anti-semitic spells, which of course are bad enough. She doesn't refer at all to Fr. Walter Ciszek's wonderful memoirs "With God in Russia" and "He Leadeth Me". Those wanting a firsthand account by a Catholic priest who survived in the worst of the northern camps should read those books. You won't find much of religion in Applebaum's account. But the book is a valuable resource nonetheless.

I've almost finished this book and I highly recommend it. The whole book is interesting beyond a doubt. Although chock full with many Russian names of people and places, I did not at all find the book hard to follow. On the grand scale, it's a lesson in what can happen when a government has too much power and when it controls the national media. I have 2 minor recommendations: I wish the book had contained more maps and I would like for her to have converted all the moneytary amounts into dolalrs. A "half a billion rubles" means zilch to me.

A sizable attempt at describing the Soviet system of forced labor camps, well-written and with as much objectivity as one could expect. Draws heavily on an astounding array of primary sources, primarily memoirs but also documents from the Soviet archives. The memoirs are the heart of the book, particularly in its powerful middle chapters, which explore various elements of the fully-developed Gulag system in brutal, engrossing detail. The richness of this portion of the book, Part 2, contrasts with bookending historical chapters that summarize the origins and eventual decline of the Gulag. These provide valuable context, and are worthwhile histories in their own right, but suffer in comparison. At some points they are downright sketchy: a bald statement in defense of the Cold War in the conclusion stands out as unproven by the work that preceded it. What the work has achieved should, however, be enough. It demonstrates the insanity of the Gulag system, the disconnect between the camp regimes' cold-blooded pseudo-rational calculations of profit and their fundamental inefficiency. In them, the Stalinist mindset, in all its paranoia, cruelty, ruthlessness, and stupidity, is reflected with unbearable clarity.