Gulag (Pulitzer Prize Winner): A History

Applebaum's work is a broad overview of the Gulag system and the politics that drove it. Considering the immensity, the author has done well in style, technique and substance to pull back the veil on a system of human aberrance so huge that it has no peers in recent history. But it is difficult to review this book fairly due to it's content. For those knowing names and having photos of individuals lost to this maw of human depravity there can be no enjoyment here. For them, this is a terrible, terrible book confirming the worst whispers and imaginings of what `being sent to Siberia' was really like. A ghastly book exposing the worst kinds of assault on human dignity even beyond the mass slaughters of the Katina woods or Hitler's ovens. It's victims were tortured, starved, dehumanized in the most perverse ways imaginable to not only eliminate them as hurdles to central planning but intentionally squeeze from them their last drops of blood. Many luckily died much before, but that does not change intent. The only redeeming value in Applebaum's book is the exposure to drive assurance that such inhumanity never plagues our species again. But of course, it is ongoing in other hell holes at this very time. Such being the secret inner working of totalitarians who by necessity must find venues of disposal of it's human waste. Waste being opponents, whether individuals, tribes, or whole countries that do not fit utopia's mold. Or, as Applebaum reveals, merely foils to divert attention from the systemic and abject conditions visited on the working class by it's overlord central planners. I read this book not for entertainment but to better understand what happened to those left in Eastern Europe after the Nazism took it's first cut. One person looking back to discover the desecration of his family tree and his ethnic inheritance. But imagine the disappointment to discover that "Gulags" were too good for any other than Russia's own 30 million. Eastern Europeans, as it turns out, were cast into even lower levels of hells reserved especially for them in elsewhere's unknown. It is absolutely mind boggling to multiply my familial losses, illness to the escapees and even after-affects to progeny, by 30 million. But apparently those numbers do not suffice. For even now the public record is incomplete as to other administrative compartments, categories and hells that might have been, or are still ongoing, to serve as gear-works for the machines of totalitarianism. It is a commendable book that serves it's topic well. If you are compelled to read and discover, do so. But I cannot imagine anyone having any morsel of compassion or empathy for the human soul enjoying the reading of these words.

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!

Gulag by Anne Applebaum is an essential work surveying the Soviet Gulag beginning in 1921. It is an excellent chronicle of the Gulag camps taking both a chronological survey, and a thematic perspective. The chronological chapters jumped too much in the time periods to have a sense of the author’s direction. However, Part two s very effective reflecting life in the camps from every aspect from being transported to the camps, groups of prisoners, guards, women, work, food, and simply daily living. There is liberal use of quotations that breathes life into the prison camps and the daily struggles for survival. She also goes into great detail how the camps evolved and changed over time covered. The government’s prison policies are well documented beginning with Lenin through Gorbachev. In the work Applebaum set a goal to include the prison camps and abuses under the Soviet Eastern European satellite countries. This chapter is lengthy and merely a collection of facts and figures and does not provide any of the qualitative struggles discussed in part 2. These chapters are included by the author to provide a comprehensive survey of the Soviet Gulag. With access to greater documentation Gulag is an excellent and more comprehensive work that updates Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago published in the West during the 1970s. I recommend reading A Day in the Life of Denis Ivanovich by Solzhenitsyn which gives a fictional account of one day in a prison labor camp published in the West in 1962-63. It is one book that has left a memorable impression on me. Due to the lack of information and contradictions in documents she notes the difficulties in assessing how many people entered the Gulag. In an appendix she provides a discussion of many people were impacted. Relying on other studies she that 6 t0 7 million people exiled and 28.7 forced laborers entered the Gulag. I found the introduction and epilogue mandatory reading. Kindle readers need to be aware that the book opens at chapter one and need to go back to the introduction. Her summary is outstanding and points out that the Gulag does receives very little attention in comparison to the NAZI Holocaust. In an epilogue she points out that Russia has not confronted its past atrocities, and is becoming a forgotten memory with the likelihood that history will repeat itself.

This is a well written and fascinating book that provides startling and comprehensive perspectives into the Soviet Union's Gulag system, primarily under Stalin but continuing after his death. It is well researched and provides excellent reporting on how the camps functioned, how they were administered, variations on how different types of prisoners were treated in different camps and within any given camp. Applebaum explains the combination of economic, "re-education" and punitive objectives supporting the existence of the camps. The selection of prisoners included those regarded as class enemies, those who might become class enemies, a number chosen randomly and prisoners who had committed non political crimes such as murder, rape, etc. The quality of treatment of any given prisoner or category of prisoner relied primarily on their usefulness to meeting sometimes conflicting objectives of Soviet leaders. If prisoners failed to meet the production norms, established by the Communist leaders, they starved to death. One exception seemed to be the actual criminals who seemed to have lived better than the political prisoners who who were not always subject to production quotas. Compassion and decency was clearly in short supply as the system brutalized almost everyone involved in it, including the prisoners who learned that survival was not consistent with caring for others. It was a Darwinian existence that usually destroyed the qualities of decency employed in civilized society. Applebaum does an an excellent job of trying to tell the story of the Gulags from viewpoints of the prisoners, the families affected but also those running the camps and those making and implementing policies that governed the Gulags. The book reports extensively reports on how prisoners attempted to cope with their condition including temperatures of minus 50 degrees fahrenheit, extreme hunger, and indifference to whether they lived or died. One is overwhelmed by the sense of dehumanization imposed on prisoners, their families, including children but also on many of those running the camps. Guards could become prisoners and prisoners could sometimes become guards. For those interested in the history of the Gulags, this is an outstanding book.

It's a work of labor as much as debt and seer investigative powers. It covers every aspect of the Gulag system from its pre-history to its closing-down. Russia's history is sad, unsentimental, and violent. One must thank God that Americans took a more noble and humane path for their history. If people get what they deserve, the Russians must be really wicked, and Americans must congratulate themselves. Take these words from a Russian of today: "Perhaps the old system was bad -but at least we were powerful, we don't want to hear that it was bad." So will the devil himself say on the day of reckoning. Bad people make bad systems. "The new Russian elite's arrogant contempt for its fellow citizens lives on" says the author. Seems like Russia -and the rest of the world- is in for some more trouble soon. One might wrongly assume that once through the first half of the book, the second will be just more of the same, but read on, it can always get worse. Despite the huge amount of information it collects, it still does not cover the story of the "special exiles", millions of people who were sent not to concentration camps but to live in remote villages were they died of cold, starvation or overwork. Gorky's description of the prisoners of the forced labor camps, and the kulaks: "half-animals". He and the other "intellectuals" were the ones most exhilarated by the "progress" of Soviet society! What still amazes me most is the extreme of voluntary blindness that many Russian communists reached to explain away their own arrests and torture: "We are honest Soviet people, hurrah for Stalin, we aren't guilty and our state will free us from the company of all these enemies. Their arrests were caused by "the cunning work of foreign intelligence services". With this kind of people abounding in your country what can anyone expect. Thank God, again and again, for America.

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.

Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum wrote a masterpiece. Between 1929 -1953, 18 million people went through the Soviet concentration camps. She researched and wrote about a subject that was long ignored by scholarship, the grossly inhumane treatment and murder of innocent millions. I liked her style, as she did not try to be sensational, matter in fact her descriptions are all factual and realistic. Applebaum very well explained that vast majority of these imprisoned people were guilty of nothing. They were most often accused of being "enemies of the of the class" in another words lacking sympathy with communism. The Soviet economy just badly needed free labor. The Soviet prisoners were expected to mine gold, dig canals, lay rails, sometimes in very difficult or extremely cold areas. Applebaum wrote a very powerful Introduction: she sharply showed a strong similarity between Hitler and Stalin, especially in their process of dehumanization of prisoners in the concentration camps. She has divided her book in three parts: Origins of the Soviet Camps, Life and Work in the Camps and Rise and Fall of the Camps. This well organized way of Applebaum really helps the reader to understand deeper how such monstrous hell could be operated in the twentieth century for such a long time. As she said, this is not a history of the Soviet Union, this is strictly the history of the countless Soviet concentration camp systems. In 1953 Stalin died. The number of the camps started to decrease, however Applebaum reminds us, our President Reagan and the Soviet leader Gorbachev in the 1980s still were discussing their existence! This book should be read in every history class of our country. I admire the author for her valuable contribution, expanding our awareness about an untold phase of human history. E. Thiry

Here is a book on a subject that many of us THINK we are familiar with, but really we only know the tip of the iceberg. The author has obviously spent a great deal of time on personal travel to the former Soviet Union, conducting oral interviews and collecting data from recently-released former Soviet archives. He quotes from dozens of personal memoirs and has given us in the West a whole new concept of the immense scope of the Soviet prison system that dominated so much of life in that county. He also points out that given the repressive nature of the Soviet system, there are many Russian and former Soviet citizens...even those who lived through it...who don't have a complete undestanding of what actually happened to them or their forebears. The reason for the deduction of one star is due to the fact the Kindle edition I purchased did not have the hotlinks for footnotes enabled. This is quite a lengthy book, and there are many footnotes. The inability to click on the footnote number, read the note, and then return to the text, basically nullified the presence of the footnote. Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how tyranny is able to get a foothold in a country, how people can conduct such "horrible atrocities" and live with themselves (and conversely how peole can survive them). It makes one wonder how this happened in the 20th century, and if it is likely to happen again in our so-called "enlightened" 21st century.

Muy bueno, no decepciona nada de nada, si quieres documentarte sobre las promesas y felicidad que vende el comunismo pero la dura realidad que esconde. Debería leerlo todos los pelagatos de letras de la UCM que se dejan embaucar por una "ideología" política responsable de tantos millones de muertos y aniquilación como Hitler. Pero es que los nazis perdieron la guerra y los comunistas no, y se han preocupado de que nadie cuente las verdades de sus atrocidades y millones de muertos fruto del amor a su pueblo de Lenin o Stalin. Esa idología igual que una secta que promete el paraíso y te trae la degradación y aniquilación. Debería ser lectura obligatoria de preuniversidad. ¿Para cuándo un Erasmus en Venezuela o Cuba que espabile a los borregos que capta el comunismo en España? Vamos al WC con tanto ignorante suelto.

Incredible work

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Interessante ed istruttivo. Prima e terza parte ottime.Seconda parte un po' meno buona. Globalmente una bella lettura

Applebaum’s Gulag is an incredible piece of work. She does an amazing job of bringing attention to a tragic and often overlooked part of history. The book is deeply researched but still very readable, and it really makes you think about how much of this past has been ignored or forgotten over the years. It’s powerful, sobering, and absolutely worth reading.