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Anne Applebaum

Gulag: A History Kindle Edition

by Anne Applebaum (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • This magisterial and acclaimed history offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost.

“A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be.” –The New York Times

The Gulag—a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners—was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, Gulag is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century.

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978-1400034093
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Anchor
Publication date

December 18, 2007
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English
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“An important book. . . . It is fervently to be hoped that people will read Anne Applebaum’s excellent, tautly written, and very damning history.” —The New York Times Book Review

“The most authoritative—and comprehensive—account of this Soviet blight ever published by a Western writer.” —Newsweek

“A titanic achievement: learned and moving and profound. . . . No reader will easily forget Applebaum’s vivid accounts of the horrible human suffering of the Gulag.” —National Review

“A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be.” –The New York Times

“Lucid, painstakingly detailed, never sensational, it should have a place on every educated reader’s shelves.” –Los Angeles Times

“Magisterial. . . . Certain to remain the definitive account of its subject for years to come. . . . An immense achievement.” —The New Criterion

“An excellent account of the rise and fall of the Soviet labor camps between 1917 and 1986. . . . A splendid book.” —The New York Review of Books

“Should become the standard history of one of the greatest evils of the 20th century.” —The Economist

“Thorough, engrossing . . . A searing attack on the corruption and the viciousness that seemed to rule the system and a testimonial to the resilience of the Russian people. . . . Her research is impeccable.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“An affecting book that enables us at last to see the Gulag whole. . . . A valuable and necessary book.” –The Wall Street Journal

“Ambitious and well-documented . . . Invaluable . . . Applebaum methodically, and unflinchingly, provides a sense of what it was like to enter and inhabit the netherworld of...

From the Inside Flap

The Gulag--a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners--was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. In this magisterial and acclaimed history, Anne Applebaum offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost. Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, Gulag is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

From the Back Cover

The Gulag--a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners--was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. In this magisterial and acclaimed history, Anne Applebaum offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost. Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, Gulag is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

BOLSHEVIK BEGINNINGS

But your spine has been smashed,
My beautiful, pitiful era,
And with an inane smile
You look back, cruel and weak,
Like an animal past its prime,
At the prints of your own paws.
--Osip Mandelstam, "Vek"1

One of my goals is to destroy the myth that the cruelest era of repression began in 1936-37. I think that in future, statistics will show that the wave of arrests, sentences and exile had already begun at the beginning of 1918, even before the official declaration, that autumn, of the "Red Terror." From that moment, the wave simply grew larger and larger, until the death of Stalin . . .
--Dmitrii Likhachev, Vospominaniya2

In the year 1917, two waves of revolution rolled across Russia, sweeping Imperial Russian society aside as if it were destroying so many houses of cards. After Czar Nicholas II abdicated in February, events proved extremely difficult for anyone to halt or control. Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the first post-revolutionary Provisional Government, later wrote that, in the void following the collapse of the old regime, "all existing political and tactical programs, however bold and well conceived, appeared hanging aimlessly and uselessly in space."3

But although the Provisional Government was weak, although popular dissatisfaction was widespread, although anger at the carnage caused by the First World War ran high, few expected power to fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks, one of several radical socialist parties agitating for even more rapid change. Abroad, the Bolsheviks were scarcely known. One apocryphal tale illustrates foreign attitudes very well: in 1917, so the story goes, a bureaucrat rushed into the office of the Austrian Foreign Minister, shouting, "Your Excellency, there has been a revolution in Russia!" The minister snorted. "Who could make a revolution in Russia? Surely not harmless Herr Trotsky, down at the Café Central?"

If the nature of the Bolsheviks was mysterious, their leader, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov--the man the world would come to know by his revolutionary pseudonym, "Lenin"--was even more so. During his many years as an émigré revolutionary, Lenin had been recognized for his brilliance, but also disliked for his intemperance and his factionalism. He picked frequent fights with other socialist leaders, and had a penchant for turning minor disagreements over seemingly irrelevant matters of dogma into major arguments.4

In the first months following the February Revolution, Lenin was very far from holding a position of unchallenged authority, even within his own Party. As late as mid-October 1917, a handful of leading Bolsheviks continued to oppose his plan to carry out a coup d'état against the Provisional Government, arguing that the Party was unprepared to take power, and that it did not yet have popular support. He won the argument, however, and on October 25 the coup took place. Under the influence of Lenin's agitation, a mob sacked the Winter Palace. The Bolsheviks arrested the ministers of the Provisional Government. Within hours, Lenin had become the leader of the country he renamed Soviet Russia.

Yet although Lenin had succeeded in taking power, his Bolshevik critics had not been entirely wrong. The Bolsheviks were indeed wildly unprepared. As a result, most of their early decisions, including the creation of the one-party state, were taken to suit the needs of the moment. Their popular support was indeed weak, and almost immediately they began to wage a bloody civil war, simply in order to stay in power. From 1918, when the White Army of the old regime regrouped to fight the new Red Army--led by Lenin's comrade, "Herr Trotsky" from the "Café Central"--some of the most brutal fighting ever seen in Europe raged across the Russian countryside. Nor did all of the violence take place in battlefields. The Bolsheviks went out of their way to quash intellectual and political opposition in any form it took, attacking not only the representatives of the old regime but also other socialists: Mensheviks, Anarchists, Social Revolutionaries. The new Soviet state would not know relative peace until 1921.5

Against this background of improvisation and violence, the first Soviet labor camps were born. Like so many other Bolshevik institutions, they were created ad hoc, in a hurry, as an emergency measure in the heat of the civil war. This is not to say the idea had no prior appeal. Three weeks before the October Revolution, Lenin himself was already sketching out an admittedly vague plan to organize "obligatory work duty" for wealthy capitalists. By January 1918, angered by the depth of the anti-Bolshevik resistance, he was even more vehement, writing that he welcomed "the arrest of millionaire-saboteurs traveling in first- and second-class train compartments. I suggest sentencing them to half a year's forced labor in a mine."6

Lenin's vision of labor camps as a special form of punishment for a particular sort of bourgeois "enemy" sat well with his other beliefs about crime and criminals. On the one hand, the first Soviet leader felt ambivalent about the jailing and punishment of traditional criminals--thieves, pickpockets, murderers--whom he perceived as potential allies. In his view, the basic cause of "social excess" (meaning crime) was "the exploitation of the masses." The removal of the cause, he believed, "will lead to the withering away of the excess." No special punishments were therefore necessary to deter criminals: in time, the Revolution itself would do away with them. Some of the language in the Bolsheviks' first criminal code would have thus warmed the hearts of the most radical, progressive criminal reformers in the West. Among other things, the code decreed that there was "no such thing as individual guilt," and that punishment "should not be seen as retribution."7

On the other hand, Lenin--like the Bolshevik legal theorists who followed in his wake--also reckoned that the creation of the Soviet state would create a new kind of criminal: the "class enemy." A class enemy opposed the Revolution, and worked openly, or more often secretly, to destroy it. The class enemy was harder to identify than an ordinary criminal, and much harder to reform. Unlike an ordinary criminal, a class enemy could never be trusted to cooperate with the Soviet regime, and required harsher punishment than would an ordinary murderer or thief. Thus in May 1918, the first Bolshevik "decree on bribery" declared that: "If the person guilty of taking or offering bribes belongs to the propertied classes and is using the bribe to preserve or acquire privileges, linked to property rights, then he should be sentenced to the harshest and most unpleasant forced labor and all of his property should be confiscated."8

From the very earliest days of the new Soviet state, in other words, people were to be sentenced not for what they had done, but for who they were.

Unfortunately, nobody ever provided a clear description of what, exactly, a "class enemy" was supposed to look like. As a result, arrests of all sorts increased dramatically in the wake of the Bolshevik coup. From November 1917, revolutionary tribunals, composed of random "supporters" of the Revolution, began convicting random "enemies" of the Revolution. Prison sentences, forced-labor terms, and even capital punishment were arbitrarily meted out to bankers, to merchants' wives, to "speculators"--meaning anyone engaged in independent economic activity--to former Czarist-era prison warders and to anyone else who seemed suspicious.9

The definition of who was and who was not an "enemy" also varied from place to place, sometimes overlapping with the definition of "prisoner of war." Upon occupying a new city, Trotsky's Red Army frequently took bourgeois hostages, who could be shot in case the White Army returned, as it often did along the fluctuating lines of the front. In the interim they could be made to do forced labor, often digging trenches and building barricades.10 The distinction between political prisoners and common criminals was equally arbitrary. The uneducated members of the temporary commissions and revolutionary tribunals might, for example, suddenly decide that a man caught riding a tram without a ticket had offended society, and sentence him for political crimes.11 In the end, many such decisions were left up to the policeman or soldiers doing the arresting. Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka--Lenin's secret police, the forerunner of the KGB--personally kept a little black notebook in which he scribbled down the names and addresses of random "enemies" he came across while doing his job.

These distinctions would remain vague right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, eighty years later. Nevertheless, the existence of two categories of prisoner--"political" and "criminal"--had a profound effect on the formation of the Soviet penal system. During the first decade of Bolshevik rule, Soviet penitentiaries even split into two categories, one for each type of prisoner. The split arose spontaneously, as a reaction to the chaos of the existing prison system. In the very early days of the Revolution, all prisoners were incarcerated under the jurisdiction of the "traditional" judicial ministries, first the Commissariat of Justice, later the Commissariat of the Interior, and placed in the "ordinary" prison system. That is, they were thrown into the remnants of the Czarist system, usually into the dirty, gloomy stone prisons which occupied a central position in every major town. During the revolutionary years of 1917 to 1920, these institutions were in total disarray. Mobs had stormed the jails, self-appointed commissars had sacked the guards, prisoners had received wide-ranging amnesties or had simply walked away.13

By the time the Bolsheviks took charge, the few prisons that remained in operation were overcrowded and inadequate. Only weeks after the Revolution, Lenin himself demanded "extreme measures for the immediate improvement of food supplies to the Petrograd prisons."14 A few months later, a member of the Moscow Cheka visited the city's Taganskaya prison and reported "terrible cold and filth," as well as typhus and hunger. Most of the prisoners could not carry out their forced-labor sentences because they had no clothes. A newspaper report claimed that Butyrka prison in Moscow, designed to hold 1,000 prisoners, already contained 2,500. Another newspaper complained that the Red Guards "unsystematically arrest hundreds of people every day, and then don't know what to do with them."15

Overcrowding led to "creative" solutions. Lacking anything better, the new authorities incarcerated prisoners in basements, attics, empty palaces, and old churches. One survivor later remembered being placed in the cellar of a deserted house, in a single room with fifty people, no furniture, and little food: those who did not get packages from their families simply starved.16 In December 1917, a Cheka commission discussed the fate of fifty-six assorted prisoners--"thieves, drunks and various 'politicals' "--who were being kept in the basement of the Smolny Institute, Lenin's headquarters in Petrograd.17

Not everyone suffered from the chaotic conditions. Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British diplomat accused of spying (accurately, as it happened), was imprisoned in 1918 in a room in the Kremlin. He occupied himself playing Patience, and reading Thucydides and Carlyle. From time to time, a former imperial servant brought him hot tea and newspapers.18

But even in the remaining traditional jails, prison regimes were erratic, and prison wardens were inexperienced. A prisoner in the northern Russian city of Vyborg discovered that, in the topsy-turvy post-revolutionary world, his former chauffeur had become a prison guard. The man was delighted to help his former master move to a better, drier cell, and eventually to escape. One White Army colonel also recalled that in the Petrograd prison in December 1917 prisoners came and left at will, while homeless people slept in the cells at night. Looking back on this era, one Soviet official remembered that "the only people who didn't escape were those who were too lazy."20

The disarray forced the Cheka to come up with new solutions: the Bolsheviks could hardly allow their "real" enemies to enter the ordinary prison system. Chaotic jails and lazy guards might be suitable for pickpockets and juvenile delinquents, but for the saboteurs, parasites, speculators, White Army officers, priests, bourgeois capitalists, and others who loomed so large in the Bolshevik imagination, more creative solutions were needed.

A solution was found as early as June 4, 1918, Trotsky called for a group of unruly Czech war prisoners to be pacified, disarmed, and placed in a kontslager: a concentration camp. Twelve days later, in a memorandum addressed to the Soviet government Trotsky again spoke of concentration camps, outdoor prisons in which "the city and village bourgeoisie . . . shall be mobilized and organized into rear-service battalions to do menial work (cleaning barracks, camps, streets, digging trenches, etc.). Those refusing will be fined, and held under arrest until the fine is paid."21

In August, Lenin made use of the term as well. In a telegram to the commissars of Penza, site of an anti-Bolshevik uprising, he called for "mass terror against the kulaks [rich peasants], priests and White Guards" and for the "unreliable" to be "locked up in a concentration camp outside town."22 The facilities were already in place. During the summer of 1918--in the wake of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty which ended Russia's participation in the First World War--the regime freed two million war prisoners. The empty camps were immediately turned over to the Cheka.23

At the time, the Cheka must have seemed the ideal body to take over the task of incarcerating "enemies" in "special" camps. A completely new organization, the Cheka was designed to be the "sword and shield" of the Communist Party, and had no allegiance to the official Soviet government or any of its departments. It had no traditions of legality, no obligation to obey the rule of law, no need to consult with the police or the courts or the Commissar of Justice. Its very name spoke of its special status: the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage--or, using the Russian abbreviation for "Extraordinary Commission"--the Ch-K, or Cheka. It was "extraordinary" precisely because it existed outside of "ordinary" legality.

Almost as soon as it was created, the Cheka was given an extraordinary task to carry out. On September 5, 1918, Dzerzhinsky was directed to implement Lenin's policy of Red Terror. Launched in the wake of an assassination attempt on Lenin's life, this wave of terror--arrests, imprisonments, murders--more organized than the random terror of the previous months, was in fact an important component of the civil war, directed against those suspected of working to destroy the Revolution on the "home front." It was bloody, it was merciless, and it was cruel--as its perpetrators wanted it to be. Krasnaya Gazeta, the organ of the Red Army, described it: "Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin . . . let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie--more blood, as much as possible . . ."24

The Red Terror was crucial to Lenin's struggle for power. Concentration camps, the so-called "special camps," were crucial to the Red Terror. They were mentioned in the very first decree on Red Terror, which called not only for the arrest and incarceration of "important representatives of the bourgeoisie, landowners, industrialists, merchants, counter-revolutionary priests, anti-Soviet officers" but also for their "isolation in concentration camps."25 Although there are no reliable figures for numbers of prisoners, by the end of 1919 there were twenty-one registered camps in Russia. At the end of 1920 there were 107, five times as many.26

Notes:
1. From Stekla vechnosti, pp. 172-73.
2. Likhachev, Vosppminania, p. 118.
3. Pipes, pp. 336-37.
4. See, for example, Service, Lenin.
5. Popies, pp. 439-505; Figes, pp. 474-551.
6. Geller, pp. 23 and 24.
7. Jakobson, pp. 18-26.
8. Dekrety, vol. II, pp. 241-42, and vol. III, p. 80. Also Geller, p. 10; Pipes, pp. 793-800.
9. Jakobson, pp. 18-26; Decree "On Revolutionart Tribunals," in Sbornik, December 19, 1917, pp. 9-10.
10. Hoover, Melgunov Collection, Box 1, Folder 63.
11. Okhotin and Roginsky, p. 13.
12. RGASPI, 76/3/1 and 13.
13. Jakobson, pp. 10-17; Okhotin and Roginsky, pp. 10-24.
14. Dekrety, vol. 1, p. 401
15. Hoover, Melgunov Collection, Box 1, Folder 4.
16. Anonymous, Vo vlasti Gubcheka, pp. 3-11.
17. Hoover, Melgunov Collection, Box 1, Folder.
18. Lockhart, pp. 326-45.
19. S. G. Eliseev, "Tyuremnyi dnevnik," in Uroki, pp. 17-19.
20. Okhotin and Roginsky, p. 11.
21. Geller, p. 43.
22. Ibid., p. 44; Leggett, p. 103.
23. Initially, the Cheka were put in charge of the camps in conjunction with the Central Collegium for War Prisoners and Refugees (Tsentroplenbezh). Okhotin and Roginskii, p. 11.
24. Leggett, p. 108.
25. Decree "On Red Terror," in Sbornik, September 5, 1918, p. 11.
26. Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism, p. 13. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Nearly 30 million prisoners passed through the Soviet Union's labor camps in their more than 60 years of operation. This remarkable volume, the first fully documented history of the gulag, describes how, largely under Stalin's watch, a regulated, centralized system of prison labor-unprecedented in scope-gradually arose out of the chaos of the Russian Revolution. Fueled by waves of capricious arrests, this prison labor came to underpin the Soviet economy. Applebaum, a former Warsaw correspondent for the Economist and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, draws on newly accessible Soviet archives as well as scores of camp memoirs and interviews with survivors to trace the gulag's origins and expansion. By the gulag's peak years in the early 1950s, there were camps in every part of the country, and slave labor was used not only for mining and heavy industries but for producing every kind of consumer product (chairs, lamps, toys, those ubiquitous fur hats) and some of the country's most important science and engineering (Sergei Korolev, the architect of the Soviet space program, began his work in a special prison laboratory). Applebaum details camp life, including strategies for survival; the experiences of women and children in the camps; sexual relationships and marriages between prisoners; and rebellions, strikes and escapes. There is almost too much dark irony to bear in this tragic, gripping account. Applebaum's lucid prose and painstaking consideration of the competing theories about aspects of camp life and policy are always compelling. She includes an appendix in which she discusses the various ways of calculating how many died in the camps, and throughout the book she thoughtfully reflects on why the gulag does not loom as large in the Western imagination as, for instance, the Holocaust.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Review

"An important book. . . . It is fervently to be hoped that people will read Anne Applebaum's excellent, tautly written, and very damning history." --"The New York Times Book Review
""The most authoritative--and comprehensive--account of this Soviet blight ever published by a Western writer." --"Newsweek
""A titanic achievement: learned and moving and profound. . . . No reader will easily forget Applebaum's vivid accounts of the horrible human suffering of the Gulag." --"National Review
""A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be." -"The New York Times
""Lucid, painstakingly detailed, never sensational, it should have a place on every educated reader's shelves." -"Los Angeles Times
""Magisterial. . . . Certain to remain the definitive account of its subject for years to come. . . . An immense achievement." --"The New Criterion
""An excellent account of the rise and fall of the Soviet labor camps between 1917 and 1986. . . . A splendid book." --"The New York Review of Books
""Should become the standard history of one of the greatest evils of the 20th century." --"The Economist"
"Thorough, engrossing . . . A searing attack on the corruption and the viciousness that seemed to rule the system and a testimonial to the resilience of the Russian people. . . . Her research is impeccable." -"San Francisco Chronicle"
"An affecting book that enables us at last to see the Gulag whole. . . . A valuable and necessary book." -"The Wall Street Journal"
"Ambitious and well-documented . . . Invaluable . . . Applebaum methodically, and unflinchingly, provides a sense of what it was like to enter and inhabit the netherworld of theGulag." -"The New Yorker
"
"[Applebaum's] writing is powerful and incisive, but it achieves this effect through simplicity and restraint rather than stylistic flourish. . . . [An] admirable and courageous book." -"The Washington Monthly"
"Monumental . . . Applebaum uses her own formidable reporting skills to construct a gripping narrative." -"Newsday"
"Valuable. There is nothing like it in Russian, or in any other language. It deserves to be widely read." -"Financial Times"
"A book whose importance is impossible to exaggerate. . . . Magisterial . . . Applebaum's book, written with such quiet elegance and moral seriousness, is a major contribution to curing the amnesia that curiously seems to have affected broader public perceptions of one of the two or three major enormities of the twentieth century." -"Times Literary Supplement"
"A truly impressive achievement . . . We should all be grateful to [Applebaum]." -"The Sunday Times" (London)
"A chronicle of ghastly human suffering, a history of one of the greatest abuses of power in the story of our species, and a cautionary tale of towering moral significance . . . A magisterial work, written in an unflinching style that moves as much as it shocks, and that glistens with the teeming life and stinking putrefaction of doomed men and rotten ideals." -"The Daily Telegraph "(London)
"No Western author until Anne Applebaum attempted to produce a history of the Gulag based on the combination of eyewitness accounts and archival records. The result is an impressively thorough and detailed study; no aspect of this topic escapes her attention. Well written, accessible...enlightening for both the general reader andspecialists." --"The New York Sun
"
"For the raw human experience of the camps, read Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" or Irina Ratushinskaya's "Grey is the Color of Hope," For the scope, context, and the terrible extent of the criminality, read this history." --"Chicago Tribune" --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* We have massive amounts of data about the Nazi concentration and death camps, ranging from memoirs of survivors to incredibly detailed records kept by Nazi officials. The Nazi camps lasted just over a decade. On the other hand, the vast system of confinement, forced labor, and executions dubbed the "Gulag Archipelago" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn lasted almost 70 years, and we are just beginning to get a comprehensive picture of this affront to the human spirit. Applebaum is a former Marshall scholar and is now a journalist who covered the collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the gradual opening of KGB archives, the full horror of the Gulag is gradually emerging, and Applebaum has done a masterful job of chronicling the origin, growth, and eventual end of this monstrous system. Contrary to the beliefs of many, the Gulag was not a product of the Stalin era. Both Lenin and Trotsky staunchly backed the creation of these camps as a useful tool in their promotion of "Red Terror." Under Stalin, of course, the camps were greatly expanded, both as a repository for the victims of his various purges and as a vital component, via slave labor, in industrialization. Like the Nazi camps, the Gulag became a virtual industrial complex. Now, we are left with the evidence, the memory of survivors, and the moral obligation to uncover the full story. This brilliant and often heartbreaking work is a giant step in the fulfillment of that obligation. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Library Journal

More than a full-scale history of the Soviet Gulag, this work by the Spectator's deputy editor asks why it is so little remembered in both Russia and the West.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

Anne Applebaum is a columnist and member of the editorial board of the Washington Post. A graduate of Yale and a Marshall Scholar, she has worked as the foreign and deputy editor of the Spectator (London), as the Warsaw correspondent for the Economist, and as a columnist for the online magazine Slate, as well as for several British newspapers. Her work has also appeared in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, and the Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Radek Sikorski, and two children

Laural Merlington has performed professionally as an actor for over 30 years in regional theaters around the country. She has taught several college classes in acting and in her spare time she is a director for local community and professional theaters. Laural has done extensive voiceover work for television and radio in addition to narrating and directing many audiobooks. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0012SCJ9Y
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor (December 18, 2007)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 18, 2007
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 7201 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 1005 pages

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Anne Applebaum

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Anne Applebaum is a historian and journalist. She is a staff writer for the Atlantic as well as a Senior Fellow at the Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of several history books, including GULAG which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction; IRON CURTAIN, on the Sovietization of Eastern Europe after the war, which won the 2013 Cundill Prize for Historical Literature; and RED FAMINE, which begins with the Ukrainian revolution of 1917, ends with the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 and provides the background to today's Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

Her newest book, TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY, examines the attraction of autocratic forms of government, especially to intellectuals, all across the Western world.

Anne has been writing about Eastern Europe and Russia since 1989, when she covered the collapse of communism in Poland for the Economist magazine. She has also covered US, UK and European politics for a wide range of American and British publications. She is a former Washington Post columnist, a former member of the Washington Post editorial board, and a former deputy editor of the Spectator magazine. She is married to Radoslaw Sikorski, a Polish politician and writer, and lives in Poland and Britain.

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H-T

Full of data, facts, witness accoubts of GULAG

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 17, 2023

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10-Star worth masterpiece! The book has details of GULAG in history from how it started and ended. Each chapter flows smoothly and easy to follow the history. The Russian words are hard to pronounce, but I enjoyed the actual data, facts, and witness accounts (thrilling and exciting), which are pepped everywhere in each chapter, and in the way the author arranged those chapters is smooth, well organized and easy to follow. The interesting is that the author analytically compared GULAG to Holocaust, which helped me understand more about GULAG. I like the way the author wrote, organized, and shared her thoughts, and I purchased Red Famine (by the same author).

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 17, 2012

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Equality. Brotherhood. Soviet slave labor. For profit? Downfall. These are the words that describe the progression from liberal idealism to the imprisonment and deportation of over 28 million Soviet citizens and foreigners to what were called the Gulags, labor camps spread out across much of the now defunct Soviet Union that held those deemed "criminals" and "politicals." Not until 1962 when Aleksandr's Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published did the rest of the world recognize that the Soviet vision of a worker's paradise was nothing more than barbed wire and bondage.

Such overwhelming numbers should make anyone pause for a moment and question why people were willing to tolerate such abuse. While there may not be an easy answer to this question, author Anne Applebaum poses an even more daring question: Why has the world paid so little attention to a system of oppression that destroyed the lives of millions of people? In her introduction, for example, Applebaum makes a compelling argument when she describes American and West European tourists purchasing t-shirts and memorabilia from the Stalinist Soviet era. Would those same tourists in their right mind be caught wearing a Nazi armband or a t-shirt with Hitler's image on it? We know that Hitler and the Nazis stood for racial superiority and Social Darwinism, but are the Communist crimes against humanity less tragic because their stated goal of a classless society was somehow nobler?

This question Applebaum poses is worth the price and time a reader will spend examining the history, the life, and the downfall of the Gulag in the former Soviet Union. In Part One: The Origins of the Gulag, 1917-1939 Applebaum briefly contrasts prison camps under the Czars to that of the Bolsheviks, where Lenin deemed those who were "class enemies" were to be sent to the camps initially to live in separate quarters from the criminals. There is the Great Turning Point of 1929 when Maxim Gorky, an author initially critical of Bolshevik power, visited and then wrote a glowing review of Solovetsky prison, even though the event was clearly staged. This was also the year that Joseph Stalin took a personal interest in the Gulag so that he could generate profits for the country's industrialization plan. His inane love affair with constructing the White Sea Canal using Gulag laborers would lead to the deaths of over 25,000 prisoners, a pyric victory considering that it was built so poorly that no ships have sailed on it since its completion. When I read that Stalin was using slavery as a means of generating wealth, the world should have recognized that Communism was not that different from Fascism.

What starts out as a macro analysis of a bygone prison system quickly becomes personal in Part Two: Life and Work in the Camps. There are many interesting chapters in this section, but two that stand out are the chapters on arrests and the prisoners. The decision to arrest people can at best be described as "nonsensical" and at its worst deliberate. Those who were deemed kulaks or "prosperous" peasants, those who somehow had contact with foreigners or were labeled foreigners, and those pegged as "socially dangerous elements" found themselves quickly arrested and either deported, shot, or sentenced to a prison camp, whose severity depended on their actions against the state. Of particular interest is the culture of the Gulag in terms of those deemed criminals or politicals. Those who were considered politically subversive were reviled more than criminals who had committed heinous crimes such as rape and murder.

Finally, there is the apex and rapid downfall of the Gulag, where Applebaum provides more statistics on life inside during World War II. In 1941, for example, over 352,000 prisoners died, and by the end of the war more than two million would perish. Near the end and right after the war, she also lists the thousands of foreign nationals and Soviet minorities who were deported or were arrested. Of particular interest are the thousands of ethnic Muslims such as Chechens and Tartars who were forced from their lands and were not allowed to return. Applebaum does not explicitly state this, but one can surmise that much of the terrorism we encounter today can be traced back to the decisions of Joseph Stalin. Surprisingly, in 1953, right after Stalin's death, there were close to 2.5 million prisoners in a Gulag, the highest at any point. While the Gulag officially ended after Stalin's death, there were still political dissidents in prison camps well into the 1980s under Gorbachev.

What is particularly incredible about Applebaum's book is her ability to capture the sentiments of former Soviet citizens during and after the era of the Gulag. In her travels in the former Soviet Union, Applebaum describes people's mostly distained reactions when they discovered her interest in the Gulag. Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent and current president of Russia, reflects this unwillingness to own up to the past other than to mention that he sees no reason to dwell upon it. Right after World War II, West Germans underwent "de-Nazification" so that they could regain their humanity. Based on Applebaum's book, shouldn't the world expect the same from Russians? Last time I checked, actions speak louder than even the right words.

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Matt

Know History, We are bound to repeat it.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 12, 2023

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Great historical a count of the Gulag and the Russian Stalinist mindset, which is all the more applicable today with the events in Ukraine.

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Publius

An excellent book on Communist Holocaust committed in the Soviet Union

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 28, 2023

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Anne Applebaum, both of whose parents are ethnic White Russians, was able to access the Soviet Archives which adds confirmation and documentation to the extensive crimes of the Soviet Communist State. Anne Applebaum is a Yale graduate who was highly educated in Russian studies, so, she was the perfect person at the perfect moment to write The Gulag; she confirms and reaffirms the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and earlier writers in a one volume book and she won The Pulitzer Prize for this book. Anne actually visited several of the 500+ GULAG work camps which were actually usually death camps.

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OsmanPasha

Thorough historical tome

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 18, 2023

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Ms Applebaum captures, at both a macro and personal level, the horrors of the Soviet gulag. A must read for anyone interested in one of the 20th Century's most tragic chapters.

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Ron L

"The banality of evil" was never so obvious

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 12, 2018

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This is not an easy book to read, and I’m sure it was much harder to write in such a way that the reader would read it. It is also not a mere listing of the number who died or concise descriptions of the tortures employed for whatever purpose, although those matters are discussed if you are so interested.
It is an overview of the ‘staat in staat’ of the Gulag; once you ‘entered’ the organization, Soviet public law (such as it was) became irrelevant. You were no longer a Soviet citizen; you were a denizen of the Gulag. And under Stalin, your arrest was a purely arbitrary matter; you might have as easily been hit by lightning, and for the same ‘reason’.
But before a reader gets to the exploration of the subject, the author makes the introduction interesting on its own; Ms. Applebaum examines the asymmetry of Western response to Hitler, a universally despised mass murderer, compared to Stalin, who, by direct order, starved more Ukrainians to death than the number of Jews Hitler managed to kill in his ‘industrialized’ murder machines. Even now, people in the EU and the US who would never hint of a defense of Hitler will dismiss Stalin’s crimes as trivial, and often claim his show trials as, well, maybe justified. Those need to read Judt in “Post War”, (certainly no ‘capitalist tool’), who, examining all of the evidence, has to admit that ‘central planning leads to centralized murder’. But there remain in the West those who still, in spite of all evidence continue to hope otherwise.
Specifically, she mentions Heidegger, whose early flirtation with the Nazis ruined his reputation, while Sarte was given a pass for taking an ‘omelets and broken eggs’ position, as was Camus, not to mention that pathetic excuse for a journalist William Durante, who originated that despicable phrase.
She excuses that asymmetry in a way which seems far too kind; simply assuming the Western left was forgivably stupid. We continue to live with that stupidity, and I do not see it as forgivable; “Useful idiots” seems more than appropriate here.
Regardless, we are led through the Gulag from arrest to, sometimes, release. Yes, many were released, quite a few near death to die shortly after to avoid another death stat on the camp’s record. And then quite often those released were released at the camp entrance with no resources to return to their homes, nor ‘clean’ papers. Some few who were released were given official ‘forgiveness’ and, if they could find their way ‘home’, might return to a normal life. Suffice to say, the system is revealed as it was: Slave labor, under horrible conditions, and with scant chance of return to normality.
Not surprisingly, it seems the cruelty was (largely) not directed from Moscow, but was simply a product of the same dystopian Soviet system which produced thousands of shoes, all of the same size; there was no incentive for the workers to do other than the least they could. Ms. Applebaum quotes Solzhenitsyn pointing out that the zeks went thirsty not by design, but because the guards would have to fetch the water and carry it back to the zeks; they’d rather take the time for a smoke. Indeed, the banality of evil.
There is far more in the detailed examination of the cultures within the camps (and prisons) zeks, trustys, guards, administrators, and finally an accounting of the delayed release of the political prisoners; it is all worth reading as it clearly defines the Soviet leadership’s dismissal of the matter; the Gulag was part and parcel of the evil of communism.
For those still trying to put lipstick on the commie pig, I’m sure you’ll find details to dispute. For the rest of us, it is far beyond worthy of reading.

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Surfing Serf

Too cold and detached for me

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 27, 2020

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I'm about a third of the way through this book, and I'm not sure I'll finish it. I'd say that if you were doing a thesis or a dissertation on the Gulag, this is definitely the book for you, as it's extremely scholarly and well researched.

But if you're someone who wants to understand just how horrible the Gulag was, this definitely ISN'T a good book: it's 90% facts and figures, presented in a way that's too cold and detached (in my opinion) for its subject matter. Instead, read Solzhenitsyn's great work (though it's a struggle at times), or Evgenia Ginsburg's 'Into The Whirlwind' and 'Within The Whirlwind', Janusz Bardach's 'Man Is Wolf To Man', or Alexander Dolgun's book, 'Dolgun'. Any one of them will help you appreciate the nightmare the Gulag was far better than Applebaum's book.

17 people found this helpful

PJordan

A harrowing account of a different holocaust

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 7, 2020

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One of the most unnerving aspects of this extensively referenced work is the passing references to the early stages of Putin's Russia and it becomes even more disturbing whilst reading it to contemplate that Putin harbours a nostalgia and a sentimentality to roll back to a type of Russia that produced the Gulags. This is a hugely impressive work that draws on a huge amount of references and archives including but over and above the obvious such as Solzhenitsyn and Shamalov to paint a wide ranging and harrowing picture of the Soviet penal camps which predated and survived Stalin's rein but thrived at their height during his tyranny. Her access to Soviet archives is as impressive as the latent denial and collective amnesia that she portrays as still existing within the Russian people who either alternatively suffered under the gulag system, turned a blind eye to it for their own preservation or profited from it. Of course the legacy of the Gulags is still evident in the vast mineral/oil industry of Siberia. An industry which thrives under the patronage of a benovelent Putin whose personal wealth and popularity is undoubtedly funded by it's continuing operation, in spite of an atrocious continuing environmental record merely perpetuating the legacy of 80 years of unspeakable costs in terms of human lives and misery.

7 people found this helpful

Norman D Landing

The size of the print

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 28, 2019

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It is in very small print. 43 lines per page is hard-going for my 69-year old eyes. Maybe the product description for books should mention the print-size.

15 people found this helpful

Charlie Sebbage

The only book on gulag you need to read!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 5, 2017

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This is a side of history I knew little about! Iam 30 years old & English & was always taught Hitler was the big bad wolf (which he is) but what Stalin did was equally as bad & the terror went on long after WW2! This book is one of those which must be read so we don't forget & let history repeat! Shocking, gruesome, scary & terribly sad it's not an easy read but is incredibly well written!

22 people found this helpful

Helena

Communist Crimes

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 18, 2018

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The West is hardly interested, people with knowledge have been mostly eliminated, so there is nobody to tell these horrific stories. Anne, thank you for your research!

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