Gulag : A History

Rating:
Summary: A Monumental Work
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: Gulag: A History
Review: In a recent book review, Applebaum includes Salvator Allende in
a list of "murderous communist leaders" next to Stalin and Pol Pot. In "Gulag: A History" she choses Joe McCarthy as an example of a man with a correct view of Stalin. In an older article on Vorkuta, a town in Siberia founded essentially by Gulag prisoners during Stalin, she makes no secret of her antipathy for the "wretches" who insist of living there (the town they were born and raised in) although the state encourages and subsidizes their move to places in the south of Russia. These are just a few examples that show where Applebaum stands in relation to Communism and related issues. Her position is legitimate but they also show a strong emotional involvement in the subject and that is highly relevant if one is to trust her book "Gulag: A History". Since it deals with such a sensitive issue that relies on sources the reader almost certainly has no access to, this trust is crucial. When I first heard of the book, my concern was not that the data were distorted or fictitious but rather that their presentation as a coherent whole and interpretation was compromised by too strongly held beliefs. Unfortunately, the reading of the book confirmed this concern since a detached and nuanced approach needed for such a topic was lacking. And this brings me to the fundamental problem of the book, which is its point. Haven't we known of the murderous nature of the Communist regimes and the Gulag in particular, since the 40's? What meaningful knowledge do we gain by the enumeration of some more gruesome crimes in the Gulag? Does the book offer a new insight on the anatomy of these crimes (as was the case with Goldhagen's book on the extent of the complicity of the German public in the Nazi crimes)? I didn't see anything like that in this book. The only thing that comes close to that is the implicit message that "Communism was just as bad as Nazism". This message is dangerous: after 60 years, it should have finally become clear that Holocaust was simply the biggest crime in History. And this not only because of the number of people killed but above all because of the nature of the crime. Therefore, no matter how many more people are proved to have died under the communists, the crimes of Communism cannot be compared to those of Nazism.

Rating:
Summary: The Second Evil of the XX Century
Review: In the history of the XX Century, at least as seen from the "Euro-centric" point of view, there were two great evils. One was Nazism, the other one was - Communism. Unlike Nazism, however, the general perception of Communism was, and still remains today, ambivalent. So often we hear of a "great socialist idea gone wrong". Indeed, for a reader of Marx or Engels the Communism may seem very attractive remedy for the wrongs of a Capitalistic society. Yet the social and political revolution, so essential to "Marxism-Leninism", through dyctature inescapably leads to terror where the goals fully justify the means and all of the sudden killing or otherwise "eliminating" entire social classes of people, e.g. individual farmers ("kulaks") becomes a small price to pay on the altar of building "society of social justice and equality".

Anne Applebaum with her new work, through the analysis of the forced labor camp system, does a superb job of presenting Communism, especially Stalinism, , in the right perspective. It was an evil entirely on a par with Nazism, if not even worse. Only the confusion around the "theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism" and the fact that atrocities of the Soviet system had "domestic", if you will, character and were largely hidden from the plain view of a "Western eye" made this false perception possible. It has to be changed and this book is a great contribution to this end.

Having read so many laudatory comments from the fellow readers I can't possibly come up with anything new to commend this book. It is indeed the most comprehensive, most synthetic and most in-depth depiction and analysis of the Soviet forced labor camp system, the best since the famous "Gulag Archipelago" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

But I would add another reading recommendation, a book that was, as far as I can tell, the first to describe and analyze experience of living in the Gulag beyond just a memoir, one that any careful reader of this work will instantly recognize for Anne Applebaum acknowledges it as one of the main bibliographical sources and quotes from it very extensively. It is "World Apart" by Gustav Herling. Himself a Gulag prisoner and survivor Herling put his experiences of living in a forced labor camp on paper shortly after the WWII and published in 1951 in England. Unlike the voluminous works by Solzhenitsyn and Applebaum this one is relatively short and concise. And it is written in such a literary manner that it captivates reader completely, making him feel as if he were right there himself experiencing on his own skin the horrors of Gulag and seeing in his own eyes what can happen to a human being under such extreme circumstances.

One of the main thesis of Applebaum's work is that to understand the essence of the Soviet concentration camps one needs to treat it as a part of the history of the Soviet Union: "...the Gulag did not emerge, fully formed, from the sea, but rather reflected the general standards of the society around it. If the camps were filthy, if the guards were brutal (...) that was partly because filthiness and brutality (...) were plentiful in other spheres of Soviet life."

This point can and, in my view, needs to be taken one step further. For the history of the Soviet Union is a part of a still broader history of Russia itself. In this context another book comes to my mind. One by the Marquis de Custine: "Journey For Our Time". First published in France in 1843, it describes impressions of a French traveler (de Custine himself) to Czarist Russia in 1839 then ruled by Nicholas I. "The basic resemblances between the military and despotic rule of Nicholas I (...) and the absolutism of the Soviet regime are unmistakable". Indeed, one is left with a profound impression of how little changed between Czarist Russia and Bolshevik Soviet Union. This impression will, no doubt, be only further reinforced after reading another masterpiece, I highly recommend, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Notes from the Underground".

Rating:
Summary: Communism Laid Bare..
Review: In this immensely impressive work by Pulitzer prize winning author Anne Applebaum, we learn of a world eerily distant to us. As Americans, we have been rightly exposed to massive amounts of narrative, scholarly examination, and media views of the Nazi Holocaust. Yet, the decimation, abuse, and inhumanity that characterized the Soviet Union and her Gulag labor system for over 30 years seems to go unnoticed. This is perhaps for political reasons, as it may not serve certain political interests to have a communist nation take her place as the most murderous state in history. This conscious neglect may also stem from the fact that the horror is so distant, having taken place in the often frozen wastes of distant and always mysterious Russia. Whatever the reason, Ms. Applebaum has brilliantly cut through the ignorance on the subject and delivered an earth shattering look at one of the most brutal human institutions ever devised. Expertly weaving together the massive history of the labor system and the government structure that supported it along with the smaller stories from survivors, Applebaum gives the reader the total picture. It is eye opening in its authenticity and gripping in its historical intensity.

The first thing that should strike you about the book is how complex the story itself is. The history of the gulag is not as simple as the highly streamlined and relatively orderly Nazi system. Indeed, in the beginning of gulag development, the Communist justice system was as chaotic as it was cruel. When it became clear to Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders that they would need massive camps to place all their "class enemies", the system was slow to action. In combination with the realization that the wide swaths of mother Russia held massive amounts of natural resources however, the system began to become more orderly. Still, starvation, failure, and misdirection were the orders of the day. Only when Stalin came to power did the camps take on a new role, as a perfect tool for fear and oppression. Along with the NKVD, Stalin used the gulag to not only serve the Soviets economic needs (which it never truly did) but also to serve as the sword of his cult of personality. So many from so many different strata of society were jailed, and many of these people disappeared forever. More deadly than official execution, the gulags became houses of death because of bad working conditions and often barbaric living situations. The gulags developed into a fairly official way to keep the oppressed in line, but they also served to undermine the Soviet Union's national spirit. Even when the system was mostly dismantled soon after the death of Stalin, the gulags served as a bleeding wound to the image of the "worker's paradise".

This book is far beyond simple historical recreation however, it also deals with the human face of the gulag. While numerous and celebrated memoirs have been published in the United States, Applebaum expertly crystallizes these stories and creates a vivid picture of life in the gulag. We read gripping accounts of men, women, and even children ripped out of their ordinary lives and thrown into the vicious cycle that made up the Soviet forced labor system. The horror began at arrest, when the NKVD secret police would knock on the door in the middle of the night. Interrogation and transportation, usually under hellish conditions, added to the desperate condition of those arrested. All of these steps toward eventual internment are described with skillful tribute by Applebaum. Life in the camps was a mixture of terror and hope, as prisoners were forced to improvise in order to survive. New societies grew up in the gulags as more and more were shipped into them. The human form of the gulag was been written before, but never more crisp and readable than in this examination.

There is little praise that I can foist on this already heralded title. Gulag is a tour de force of hidden history, a world distant to us laid bare by the expert words of Ms. Applebaum. Along the way, we see almost every possible aspect of the gulag system, along with its Soviet overlords. The role of the guards and the position of various Soviet leaders and apparatchiks are also highlighted. Of course, Applebaum points out the fact that international outcry was consistently muted because of the political disadvantages of criticizing a communist nation. It is a lesson to be learned, and history not to be forgotten. History on an epic scale, not to be missed.

Rating:
Summary: fantastic work!
Review: Ms. Applebaum has done an exemplary job of writing a much-needed history of the Gulag. Her prodigious research is expressed in a concise, clear writing style. In the early 1970s, I read Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago." At the time I was taking modern Russian history courses at U.C. Berkeley, but have not thought about the Gulag much since then. Ms. Applebaum's book fills in some very important gaps for the mainstream western reader. It should be required reading not only for Russian history courses, but for anyone who wants to be fully informed in the history of the modern world.

Rating:
Summary: accumulation of information
Review: Next to Shalamov,Solzhenitsyn, and Ginzburg, Ms Applebaum's book is, for me, just an accumulation of information.

Rating:
Summary: Caveat emptor
Review: Problem with Anne Appelbaum is that she is a passionate Russophobe, and one has to look at her Gulag and read it not as a detached intellectual study but as an ideological exercise, because Anne Appelbaum's Gulag is certainly not a detached study and because the reader should be aware that ideology, fabrication and exaggeration, no matter how skillfully presented, never amount to research or to scholarship. Gulag is really not an anti-Communist piece but an inflammatorily anti-Russian and Russophobic book written by a journalist (not a historian) with strong anti-Russian ideological and even racial agenda on her own. In this capacity Anne Applebaum is a provocateur of the first grade. In defense of Anne Applebaum, if that can be used as her defense, I must say that she is not unique. The Russophobic genre in the United States (and to much lesser extent in Britain) is voluminous and prolific, and when American readers are buying books either on Napoleonic history or recent Communist movements they may be in for a Russophobic treat without knowing it. When I was taking a French language course about ten years ago a number of my classmates were Americans with little or no foreign language background. These were well-meaning, good people who genuinely wanted to learn French. However, many of the students had so little linguistic experience (besides the whole exercise was taking place in a non-French speaking country, with no francophone environment around to speak of), that had the instructor taught them Turkish instead of French, few of the students would have noticed the difference. Caveat emptor! The book might look well-researched and is impressively thick but in this particular instance you may well be taking Turkish classes while you signed up for a French course.

As usual Anne Applebaum starts with the premise that Stalinism or Soviet Socialism were as bad or worse than Nazism. I must here add that her Russophobia is country specific and to a degree family-related and is very deeply, in fact I sense, racially felt. Since Poland is the ultimate starting premise for Anne Applebaum's Russophobic journey, then the reader should be aware that anti-Russian sentiments there are at least 500 years old and often have little to do with Communism but originate in the ancient rivalry of those two closely related nations. Any comparison of Nazi occupation of Poland would serve as a good illustration of why, no matter how awful Soviet occupation was, the Nazi regime was incomparably more evil. In four years of Nazi occupation Poland lost 6 million people. Although the crime of Katyn (secret murder of perhaps as many 24,000 Polish officers) was despicable as was the deportation of Poles from eastern Poland to Siberia, they do not compare with the murder of some 6 million Polish citizens, deliberate destruction of housing stock, industry and agriculture or even intentional demolition of architectural landmarks. Instead in 50 odd years of Soviet occupation, population of Poland increased dramatically, restrictions on foreign travel were often minimal and most of Nazi-wrought damage was reversed. These are two entirely different scales of evil. General Wladyslaw Anders remarked to General George Patton - "With the Nazis, we [the Poles] lose our lives; with the Soviets, we lose our souls." Loss of one's soul is deplorable but unlike the loss of life it is purely a metaphysical concept.

Several of this reviewer's relatives were killed during the years of Stalinist terror. None of them was an ordinary or common person though and the regime had its own twisted reasons why it went after them. This reviewer's own grandfather spent almost 14 years in Stalin's Gulag and, in-between, 3 years in the Nazi captivity as a POW. This reviewer invested inordinate amounts of own time and money in researching the subject of Soviet political persecution and helping people find information about their relatives. This reviewer also petitioned President Putin, current president of the Russian Federation, to create a special commission on Soviet crimes and believes that only a proper official investigation, determining exact number of victims, acknowledging all Soviet crimes regardless of how long ago they took place, and setting up a compensation scheme for the few remaining survivors is the only proper way of handling this incredibly important issue. Russia's future depends on how it handles the Stalinist and Soviet past.

This reviewer is a convinced anti-Communist who believes that the Stalinist crimes were absolutely abhorrent. In the same time it is obvious that placing Anne Appelbaum's ideologically-tainted, racist and repugnantly Russophobic creation in the same category as Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is not helpful and is in fact an insult to the memory of all the victims of Stalinism.

Rating:
Summary: Yeah, it's that good
Review: 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.


Rating:
Summary: Stunningly Beautiful Book!
Review: Sad but amazingly in-depth and full of true stories. Ranks right up there with Solzhenitzyn's "Gulag Archipelago". A well-researched and timely work!

Rating:
Summary: A comprehensive historical survey that keeps your focus.
Review: The author has written a finely detailed and never-dull survey of the Gulag. One understands upon reading this text the sheer scale of waste of resources, human potential, and the terrible psychological drain that the Gulag had on the U.S.S.R. Without delving into unneeded polemics or victor's dogma over the Cold War, Anne Applebaum nevertheless exposes with ruthless detail why the Gulag must have been one of the contributing factors in the decline of the Soviet Union.

This large volume is managed very shrewdly by the author, with neatly segmented chapters covering many aspects of the Gulag. Chapter by chapter Applebaum covers the Gulag system from several angles: the people and their sufferings in the system, aspects of the system as a bureaucratic institution, historical evolutions in the Gulag, and the people and institutions who ran this sprawling enterprise.

The beginnings, depths, and dismantling of the Gulag are other main themes in this book. We also learn how in many regards the sad legacy of the Gulag seems to have emanated from certain characteristics of the nature of incarceration in Russia, and that the system, sadly, has not completely disappeared.

While a historical account, this book almost reads at time as a (sad) novel. There are fascinating insights into how people perservered and surived in what seems the most hopeless of existences. Within the over-arching evil of the system, evil existed in various degrees and some camps were worse than others. A revelation to this reader was the use of the criminal element within the Gulag as a tool to manage the non-criminal, political inmates. Equally, revealing was the ulimate contribution of the Gulag in fomenting the criminal element in the U.S.S.R. The system saw its insurrections and did not always oppress without sparking reaction from the inmate population.

There is no shortage of interesting (though perhaps often disagreeable) characters in this book. People learn once again of the vastness of Russia, and how the country was such a crossroads for people of so many races and nations whose lives were unsettled so tragically in the Gulag. One learns, for example, how the Gulag created ethnic Eskimo bounty-hunters (for escapees), how nearly entire races of people were displaced by the system, how age old foes of Russia found so many of its citizens trapped in the Gulag. Especially sad was how inmates even entered the system from outside the U.S.S.R. as part of the deals made during the Second World War with the West's Stalinist ally. And of course the book covers the exporting of the Gulag to the Eastern-block countries occurs as an outgrowth of Soviet expansion following the Second World War.

After reading this book, the reader sees how this monstrous system transcended borders and dealt crippling disruptions to the lives of millions who at least managed to survive (and death to the millions who perished in the system). And as always one sees the vastness of Russia itself as a vast island-like prison during the Gulag era. This book takes the reader from the Solevetsky Islands near Finland to the Sea of Japan. One learns of people whose lives as components of the Gulag system enter and exit the system from and to places as distant as Palestine and India.

"Gulag" is a fasinating and thoroughly researched book that I highly recommend.