Rating: 
Summary: indeed
Review: To begin with, AA lost one star for overusing the word "indeed"The book is very readable and well researched. However, after being done with it I looked up the author and found a lot of rather lame articles discussing modern Russia to her name. How about "You've Come a Long Way, Babushka!" a piece by AA on Slate.com Or concluding the article, a part of which is dedicated to criticizing G-7 for allowing Russia to join in, with, "Next year we could invite the Egyptians, in recognition of their forebears who built the pyramids. The following year, the descendants of the Aztecs. And why not a summit meeting in Iraq? After all, Mesopotamia once mattered too." this review will most likely be of no use to you because it rates the author rather then the book, nevertheless it is a tad annoying to have a person who writes such populists articles about your country receive a Pulitzer for writing a decent book on a subject that is either forgotten or considered taboo. Is there no one else who could do the job, good lord? is there no one else!? I suppose asking for some snobby intellectual who would not dare title any of hers editorials (published on a Microsoft owned website) with "The Gulag Argumento" to have written the book about the subject so hideously tragic it doesn't stand a chance of completely entering our consciousness in not too much to ask. Yet the Pulitzer falls to Ann... awwww... the history of the motherland is a tragic one, indeed.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, not great
Review: Well, hmm, where to start. I hesitate to comment on comments, but several here were over the top. Of course 'The Gulag Archipelago' was not a work of fiction, anyone with even a cursory reading of a couple of chapters of the four volume work would figure that out. I in fact read this book from cover to cover, which I would suggest would be a good prerequisite for writing either a glowing approval, or a condemnation. To claim Ms. Applebaum to be a right wing shill is a bit ridiculous. She is a member of the editorial board and a regular columnist of the rightist mouthpiece, the Washington Post. In fact, if I have any problem with the book, it is a tendency to be overly conservative in the estimates in the appendix, and also perhaps a certain tendency to apply modern, American liberal values to the communists. (If only those darn Bolsheviks had been more concerned with homosexual rights and cultural diversity!). In truth, it is because of her credentials as a somewhat left leaning journalist that this book has merit. Robert Service, the Soviet scholar and Lenin biographer wrote that the book contains little that has not been already brought out in the Russian press. The book relies heavily on memoirs, although not exclusively. It is a good compilation of all the new information that has been brought out, and it brings home the point to yet another generation of the errors (yes, a value judgement) of communism. The point being, ideas do have consequences, not all value systems are equal, and oh my goodness, maybe there is such a thing as good and evil after all. Nazism and Communism are merely flip sides of the same coin. Both movements spring from the same intellectual wellspring, although taking a different path to the same end. I do appreciate the author's hard work, and her bringing a certain humanity to the topic. Oh, and by the way, I now read the author's columns every Wednesday in the Post. While I do not always agree with her, I have found a new respect for her efforts. Maybe she will make the leap to that 'vast right wing conspiracy' one day. ;)
Rating: 
Summary: Astounding!!!
Review: While in graduate school I studied the Gulag and found this book to offer the best interpretation of the horrific events that took place under the Stalin regime. Appelbaum reveals what the communist regime fought so hard to conceal. Readers may also want to watch the Russian film, "Burn by the Sun" which illustrates the extreme depths of Stalin's paranoia and hatred.
Rating:
Summary: This Terrific Book WIll Become The Standard Bearer!
Review: With the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago" in the early 1970s, Alexander Solzhenitsyn shocked and dismayed the Western world by masterfully detailing the existence of a horrific shadow culture within the Soviet Union, a culture comprised of a mass society of slave laborers scratching out their bare-knuckled survival in unbelievable difficulty and squalor, and having been recruited into the Gulag for a variety of economic, social, and political reasons. Given the inherent limitations of this superb albeit shocking fictional work, the West had to wait for the fall of the Soviet bloc for a more definitive and more complete treatise on the nature of the Gulag. This new book by scholar-turned-journalist Anne Applebaum represents such a work. The work is both massive and comprehensive, dealing not only with the ways in which the Gulag came into existence and then thrived under the active sponsorship of Lenin and Stalin, but also with a plethora of aspects of life within the Gulag, ranging from its laws, customs, folklore, and morality on the one hand to its slang, sexual mores, and cuisine on the other. She looks at the prisoners themselves and how they interacted with each other to the relationships between the prisoners and the many sorts of guards and jailers that kept them imprisoned. For what forced the Gulag into becoming a more or less permanent fixture within the Soviet system was its value economically in producing goods and services that were marketable both within the larger Soviet economy as well as in international trade. As it does in China today, forced labor within the Gulag for the Soviets represented a key element in expanding markets for Soviet-made goods ranging from lamps to those prototypically Russian fur hats. The Gulag came into being as a result of the Communist elite's burning desire for purges of remaining vestiges of bourgeoisie aspects of Soviet culture, and its consequent need for some deep dark hole to stick unlucky cultural offenders into to remove them semi-permanently from the forefront of the Soviet society. Stalin found it useful to expand the uses of the camp system to enhance industrial growth, and the camps became flooded with millions of Soviets found wanting in terms of their ultimate suitability for everyday life in the workers' paradise. Thus, the Gulag flourished throughout the 1920s and 1930s and even through the years of WWII, when slave labor provided an invaluable aid in producing enough war goods to help defeat the Axis powers. By the peak years of Gulag culture in the 1950s, the archipelago stretched into all twelve of the U.S. S. R.'s time zones, although it was largely concentrated in the northernmost and least livable aspects of the country's vast geographical areas. One of the most interesting and certainly more controversial aspects of the book can be found in its consideration of the relative obscurity with which both the existence and horrors associated with the Gulag has been treated to date. Compared to the much more extensively researched and discussed Holocaust of Europe's Jewish population perpetrated by the Nazi Third Reich over a twelve year period, almost nothing is known about the nearly seventy reign of the Gulag. Given the fairly recent demise of the Soviet state, and the dawning availability of data revealing the particulars of the existence of the Soviet system of political imprisonment, forced labor camps, and summary executions, one expects this massively documented, exhaustively detailed, and memorably written work will serve as the standard in the field for decades to come. This is a terrific book, and one I can heartily recommend to any serious student of 20th century history. Enjoy!
| 
