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Gulag: A History

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In 1973, when Alexander Solzhenitsyn launched the first volume of his monumental GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, an oral history of Soviet concentration camps, he expressed concern that a proper history of the camps might never be written, that those who do not wish to recall would destroy all the documents "down to the very last one."

As it happened, however, the documents were not destroyed; they remained locked away in files and archives. Nor did Solzhenitsyn foresee the coming of Mikhail Gorbachev and the advent of glasnost, his policy of openness, much less the unfettered availability of Gulag information and the flood of memoirs by camp survivors.

It was an American Sovietologist-turned-journalist, Anne Applebaum, now a Washington Post columnist, who embraced the unexpected opportunity to undertake this vast and daunting project from which whole universities of ordinary researchers might have slunk away in dismay.

Lenin himself, the founding father of Russian communism, established the first 84 camps of the Soviet Gulag almost immediately after the Russian Revolution, basing their design on tsarist precedents. Lenin's successor, Josef Stalin, presided over the Gulag's development into the far-reaching "archipelago" of which Solzhenitsyn wrote.

Transport to the camps was no less nightmarish in many cases than the camps themselves. Prisoners en route to distant camps are said to have frozen to death even before they were loaded into the cattle cars, where they would sometimes remain crowded together for more than a month. Memoirs tell of trains being stopped to take off corpses, which were thrown into ditches.

The struggle for survival was part of daily life in the camps, the struggle for bits of food, edible but often revolting, and for enough water to sustain life. In many camps, hardened criminals were part of the general population of politicals and other "enemies" who had committed no crime other than happening to have been born into the family of a relatively successful farmer. The criminals stole, murdered and raped as they pleased, often with the passive approval of the guards.

The Gulag's growth continued throughout World War II and into the early 1950s, by which time there were 476 distinct camp complexes comprising thousands of individual camps. The number of prisoners in each camp ranged from hundreds to thousands. From 1929, when the Gulag began its major expansion, until 1953, when Stalin died, some 18 million people passed through the camp system. More than three million of them perished.

Comparatively few of the Gulag prisoners (zeks) had been criminals in the conventional sense of the word. Some of them were arrested because a neighbor had heard them pass along an unfortunate joke or laugh at one, some because they had been seen engaging in "suspicious" behavior, and others were reported for having been ten minutes late for work or owning four cows in a village where other families owned only one. Some were members of a population category --- Poles, Balts, Chechens, Tartars, etc. --- that had suddenly fallen into disfavor. Immigrants were always suspect, as were ordinary Soviet citizens with foreign connections --- stamp collectors, Esperanto enthusiasts, anyone having relatives abroad, or a returned POW. In short, the smallest statistical possibility of guilt was sufficient cause for arrest and conviction.

In 1937, the secret police launched an all-out campaign to extirpate a Polish spy ring allegedly operating in the Soviet Union. The secret police arrest order, which included virtually everyone of Polish background living on Soviet soil, specified that investigation was to begin at the time of arrest, not before, as a means of expediting the process.

This transposition of procedural steps, Applebaum explains, meant the arrestees themselves would be forced to provide the evidence upon which the case against them would be built. More bluntly, she says, they were to be beaten or otherwise tortured until they "confessed" the role they had played in the apparently fictitious spy ring. Their testimony naturally implicated others, who were also arrested and similarly forced to confess whatever acts of espionage they could imagine having committed.

One of the larger questions with which Applebaum grapples is whether the Gulag system developed haphazardly, through simple accretion in response to a need for additional space for prisoners, or as part of an elaborate plan. Was it intended primarily as storage space for undesirable elements in Soviet society, or as an apparatus for collecting slave laborers and putting them to work on projects, such as the White Sea Canal and the opening of the Siberian north?

Scholars disagree, and evidence seems to support both sides. On the one hand, Peter the Great, whom Stalin obsessively admired, used serfs and prison labor to accomplish enormous construction projects at relatively little expense. Planned or not, the Gulag became immensely important as a source of virtually free labor. A Soviet historian has identified a correlation between the successful economic activity of the camps and the number of prisoners sent to them. His book also points out that sentences for petty crime became much harsher at a time when more prison laborers were urgently needed. Another example: In March 1934 the head of the secret police, G.G. Yagoda, wrote to subordinates in Ukraine ordering them to produce 15,000-20,000 prisoners, all fit to work, to help complete work on the Moscow-Volga Canal.

As pure history, GULAG is a major achievement. It also fulfills the moral imperative to expose, document, and record in service to the collective memory the fate of so many millions of human beings torn from their families who suffered and died in hostile places far from their homes. Fittingly, Applebaum's book is dedicated to her predecessors who described what had happened and thereby made possible this monumental work.

--- Reviewed by Hal Cordry

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 fictional 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!

As a Latvian, this topic has been an interest of mine since childhood. I grew up hearing about the mass deportations of June 1941. One of the memoirs cited, John Noble's, "I Was a Slave in Russia", 1960, I read at least 40 years ago. I used to have a copy of this book.

Why is this book so important? Because while dignitaries and heads of state visit Auschwitz, no one is visiting Vorkuta, Norlisk, Kolyma and other camps. Putin probably did not tell his esteemed visitors that St. Petersburg was built with bones and rests on bones. Russia has forgotten the past. Russia is ignoring the past. Russia wants the past to go away. Why else is there no official mourning or remembrances? No one mourns for the Gulag innocents in the West. Other than the survivors, no one cares about them in Russia. The author brings this up as an example that the Russia has not learned from its past. "...if we really knew what Stalin did to the Chechens, and if we felt that it was a terrible crime against the Chechen nation, it is not only Vladimir Putnin who would be unable to sit back and watch with any equanimity" page 575.

If the topic of this book were not so serious, then most of what happened sounds like the "theatre of the absurd." For example, the camp administration was "supposed" to take good care of the prisoners. For the camps were an "economic" asset to the State. However, the author points out that there was no incentive, for the most part, to make sure inmates did not die. There was an "official" written policy. Then there was what really happened.

I hope I am still alive, if and when the rest of the Gulag archives are opened. I am sending this book to Latvia.

As a professional historian (although one with no expertise in Eastern Europe), I am impressed with what I fear may be denigrated by the author's ideological opponents as a work of journalism. Applebaum has keen historical imagination, and her research has been remarkably thorough under the circumstances. (She also has a fine writing style; it's a pleasure to watch the care with which she crafts her text.) Applebaum might have made of this work nothing more than a string of horrors, a secular Foxe's Book of Martyrs. That she can communicate the terrifying nature of the Gulag and its incalculable human cost while simultaneously suggesting the larger historical issues is a testimony to her gifts as a historian.

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.

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.

As someone who has spent plenty of time studying the Soviet Union, this has to be considered one of the best on the subject to come out in some time. Not only does the book include a great amount of detail, the author helps us make sense of it and puts it in perspective. Highly recommended.

Ms. Applebaum has presented for the reader a fantastic journey through the Russian camps where so-called undesirables were placed. It takes the reader through the camps, focusing on each element of the camps. It will create confusion in your mind as to how people could, and did, respond to life and death in the camps. The book provides enough information to allow the reader to fully understand what happened, without the need to describe events in grizzly details. Ms. Applebaum does not sugarcoat anything, she just tells you what you need to know to allow you to feel you were there. Be forewarned, it will take away your warm fuzzy feeling of "It can't happen here". It will evoke feelings of sadness for those caught up in the camp system, a feeling of disappointment at having not been able to prevent this tragedy, and feelings of anger at those capable of instituting such a system. It is a tragic history story written in such a way it was difficult for me to find a "stopping point" because I simply could not put the book down. You will never again complain about life here.

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.

Reading this book was a fitting way to end my two years of living in Russia. Though it focuses on one specific aspect of Russian 20th century history - the labor camp system - it in many ways is a broader history of the inherent flaws of the Soviet Union and its cruelty. While it is a brutal condemnation of one of the most oppressive regimes of all time, and while it lays plenty of blame on contemporary Russian society and government for not taking more seriously their shameful past, this is by no means a book that is hateful towards Russia. Indeed, it is clear that the author cares greatly about this country and its people. And exposing in great detail the horrors of its past is, I think, an exercise in tough love.

This book truly does present a comprehensive history of the Gulag system. Usually when I finish a work of non-fiction I think to myself, "I wonder what else I could read on this subject." That thought did not cross my mind after reading this book. It's all here, all the atrocities, all the key figures, the personal stories of victims, the historical context. You won't need to read any more books on the Gulag after reading this one.