14 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Factual and thorough, April 12, 2006
This review is from: The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (Annals of Communism Series) (Hardcover)
Oleg Khlevniuk's Russian archive work on researching the true extent of the destruction of humans under Stalin is by far the best work in the field. By painstakingly analyzing secret reports, top secret letters between Commissars, censuses, official data, the Chrushchov era KGB research, etc. he is capable of giving an authoritative and absolutely fair analysis of exactly what went on in the GULAG system in particular and Stalinism as a whole, how many people were affected and how, and what this means for the accuracy of the 'popular view' of Stalin's crimes.
Contrary to Conquest, Malia, Montefiore etc. etc. he presents the facts and the documents as they are and lets them speak for themselves, instead of going on and on about the moral/sentimental issues without any thorough factual backing, as almost all such popular writers on the USSR do. Certainly no fan of Stalin either, he manages to present the simple facts in such a clear and well-evidenced way that he does justice to all involved. An impressive achievement considering the political meaning of the subject.
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8 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Very Scholarly Work -- a Little Boring, But Its Importance Overshadows Everything Else, August 9, 2009
This review is from: The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (Annals of Communism Series) (Hardcover)
This is one of the books in Yale University' series "Annals of Communism." So far I have read three of these works, and rated all of them with five stars. Their scholarship is impressive, and they bring the political situation under Stalin's regime into the reader's living room as no other series (or single volume) has done. Yale is to be praised for this series and this author, Oleg Khleevniuk, in particular for this fine work.
Like others in this series, this work is based on documents made available to historians from archives of the Soviet Union since the fall of Communism. The author presents many of these documents organized chronologically, tying them all together with a narrative discussing the documents, their content and importance. There is simply so much to learn here that I don't know where to begin.
It was interesting that Robert Conquest wrote the Foreword (very objectively, I might point out) when he was literally the only scholar of note to address the GULAG and its liquidation of millions of people for so many years. Liberals like Walter Lippmann, Walter Cronkite and many others denied the GULAG's existence for many years, and even if it did exist, it was supposedly more humane than the American prison system. Gee, how could so many in the American media and national political scene get it wrong? Well, for many it was an inconvenient truth that needed to be denied since they were cheering for the eventual victory of socialism and communism. But now the cat is out of the bag. So why are we still marching like a group of lemmings to a socialist state? Because people don't read books like this.
The only negative aspect of this work is that the reader is bombarded with numbers upon numbing numbers of people sent to camps, dying in transport, dying of maltreatment, dying of malnutrition, and dying of loneliness, hopelessness and every form of human depravity and degradation. Even upon release, the "repressed" individuals could at best look forward to a bleak life of hardship at a subsistance level and probably another long sentence at the government's pleasure. There was no such thing as "the pursuit of happiness" -- just the pursuit of another day to survive. All this wears the reader down, but that is as it should be. We should come to understand the inhumanity of the GULAG and the system that needed it for its own survival.
This is a book that every student in high school should read, and it they do, the virtues of our free American society might have more meaning to our pampered youth. Repression is growing in America as national bureaucracies grow and increase their power to govern the lives and well-being of the population. After some tipping point physical repression will have to be used, and it is not difficult to imagine recalcitant individuals being sent to camps for political indoctrination. Is not "anger management" used on some individuals today? How about "sensitivity training?" This is all conditioning, and if the person fails to respond appropriately in the bureaucrat's mind, what is next? I leave that to the reader's imagination.
Stalin opened his repressive measures with a campaign against the "Kulaks", supposedly wealthy peasants, but readily expanded that term to an idea rather than a specific class. The system rapidly disregarded guilt or innocence and simply ordered certain quotas for deportations. If a region could only find 5,000 people they could classify as anti-soviet agents and the quota was 10,000, the additional 5,000 were simply swept up off the streets and sent to the GULAG. Their crimes could always be determined later at random. After all, the communist regime wasn't functioning very well, and the fault had to be that of "wreckers", Kulaks, and anti-soviet elements. If the police couldn't find those actually guilty of such "crimes", then transporting others would set the example than no one was immune from deportation and help drive the criminals into hiding where they couldn't undermine government programs. Or so ran the logic.
Author Khlevniuk had done a wonderful job with this subject in a most scholarly fashion. It is now impossible to deny the GULAG existed and the mechanisms and policies of the Soviet state that brought it into existence and managed it. Sorry, Virginia, there was no Santa Claus in the Soviet Union. Read this book to discover various party officials and bureaucrats fighting turf wars and various problems in managing the GULAG. And they thought they had it bad. What about the people in the camps? What about all those who died, by beatings, shootings, and all the other attendant ills of the system? We thought Hitler's ovens were bad, but at least that was a quick end. So where are the monuments in Washington to the GULAG? Man's inhumanity to man?
Read and weep, read and weep. This is a monstrously important book.
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