Page 102 (my book) from Stalin and Beria“an enemy of the people is not only one who commits sabotage, but one who doubts the rightness of the Party line.”... women were arrested as “wives of enemies of the people” and the same applied to children.Page 241 Vladimir Bukovsky“In our camps, you were expected not only to be a slave laborer, but to sing and smile while you worked as well. They didn’t just want to oppress us; they wanted us to thank them for it.”This is a book that is horrific in scope as it details the history of the Gulag in the Soviet Union from its beginnings under Lenin.The author, who writes with great eloquence, takes us through the various stages of what occurred. The Gulag itself was a vast slave labour system that had two basic purposes: to incarcerate anyone who was perceived as a threat to the system and to use the slave labourers (the prisoners) to industrialize and modernize the Soviet Union – to build roads and railroads, work in mines, chop down trees for lumber – in other words to exploit the almost endless resources of the country.Ms. Applebaum takes us through the entire sequence of events: the arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, transport to a camp, and the camp itself. Millions passed through this system, some more than once.When examined individually these steps could be compared to imprisonment in other countries – for instance the food is atrocious. But it is the vast scale of the Gulag that sets it apart - not only in terms of human dignity, but as a crime against there own citizens. One aspect that is beyond the compare is the transport to the labour camps. Many would die during this long journey to the outer reaches of the Soviet Union where they could be locked in cattle cars or the bottom of ships and given little food and clothing. Many of the prisons were in the far north where the prisoners were forced to work long hours in the cold with inadequate clothing and small rations, even in the summer they were decimated by hordes of mosquitoes. Of interest is that the camps were controlled by the Russian mob which has a long history, as they started in the days of the Czar. These real criminals held brutal sway over the political prisoners. The number and types of prisoners were vast – “political” prisoners, exiles (as in a national group relocated for ethnic cleansing) consisting over the years of Poles, Lithuanians, Chechens, religious people, kulaks... One is never quite sure of the distinction between an exile and prisoners – in remote locations neither, due to geography, had freedom of movement. Maybe prisoners had an advantage because they were fed, usually with a bowl of watery soup.Page 421 in 1939With no warning, the NKVD had plucked these newcomers – Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Moldavians – out of their bourgeois or peasant worlds after the Soviet invasion of multiethnic eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and the Baltic States, and dumped them in large numbers, into the Gulag and exile villages.What is most sad and atrocious is the treatment of the children (which I dare say was even worse than the way women were treated). They were at the bottom of the ladder in a “society” where work was rewarded with food. Page 333Decades of propaganda, of posters draped across orphanage walls, thanking Stalin “for our happy childhood”, failed to convince the Soviet people that the children of the camps, the children of the streets, and the children of the orphanages had ever become anything but full-fledged members of the Soviet Union’s large and all-embracing criminal class.Ms. Appleton humanizes all with emotional quotes from several people, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov. The author discusses how the Gulag changed after Stalin. For instance, during the Brezhnev era Joseph Brodsky (a poet) was arrested and imprisoned on charges of “parasitism”.This book furthered my understanding of the Soviet Union and its’ successor Russia. This is not a book of numbers. It is intense and extremely well written. We are provided not just with a history of the Gulag, but of the entire country. Highly recommended for any who are interested in this important historical era. As the author mentions, it gives us another view of the Cold War – and why there was a Cold War.Page 515 Olga Adamo-Sliozberg arrested in 1936 – released in 1956“There was no one home and finally I was able to weep freely.To weep for my husband, who perished in the cellars of the Lubyanka, when he was thirty-seven years old, at the height of his powers and talent; for my children, who grew up orphans, stigmatized as the children of enemies of the people; for my parents, who died of grief; for Nikolai who was tortured in the camps; and for all of my friends who never lived to be rehabilitated but lie beneath the frozen earth of Kolyma.”
I have been reading some memoirs about the Soviet Gulags, and I discovered that I didn't have enough knowledge of Russian history to process what I was reading about individual experiences. Consequently, I picked up Applebaum's book. Her book was precisely what I needed. She presents a very systematic explanation of the gulags in three sections: 1) the historical precedents prior to Stalin's regime and the rise of their power under Stalin; 2) Day-to-day life in the gulags; and 3) the dismantling of the Gulag's after Stalin's death and their diminishing presence through several other Soviet leaders and into 21st century Russia politics and judicial / penal system. At times the amount of detail was close to overwhelming, but Applebaum places all the facts into strong frameworks without losing the debates and ambiguity present in the field because of incomplete and missing information. She blends data, history, politics, personal history, and even a few exerpts from literary works to create her history. I expected to see cruelty depicted, but what shocked me the most was the arbitrary manner in which arrests, labor, torture and even releases were conducted. It would be maddening to live under a regime that weilded so much power in ways that were incomprehensible to its people. Anyone could be arrested and placed in labor / death camps: criminals, dissidents, and even members of the Communist party. Were the gulags so heavily populated because Stalin wanted cheap labor as a way to industrialize the Soviet Union? They never were cost effective. Was he trying to brow beat people into submission? They created strife between people and government. Was he trying to reform criminals and political dissidents? Few if none of the gulag prisoners became better people because of their time in the camps -- if they lived through it. The accounts made me wonder how human beings could descend into such irrational mistreatment of one another and made me wonder if such nonesense still persists in other countries - even in small ways (even in our own). Before this summer, I could fit everything I knew about the gulags on a postage stamp. Applebaum gave me a wealth of knowledge and much to ponder. I'm glad that I found this book -- even if her book was the antithesis of a "summer read."
What do You think about Gulag: A History (2003)?
This is first rate history but difficult reading as you might suspect from its topic. Applebaum presents a strong, unblinking examination of the history of the Soviet gulag, the system of Communist prison camps that in Solzhenitsyn’s metaphoric naming spread across the Soviet Union in a vast archipelago of intentional brutality, targeted murder, malign indifference, exposure, overwork, disease, deprivation, and starvation. Everything, including the heroically stubborn survival of prisoners suffering the insufferable, enduring the unendurable, and simply outlasting this rarely mitigated evil, is hard to read but necessary for understanding.The gulag’s inmates were political opponents, real and imagined, of Stalin. They were random citizens turned in for telling a joke or making a disparaging remark about Soviet leaders or the Soviet system—or for listening to someone else make a joke or a remark. Others were citizens who were merely suspected of something because they received mail from abroad, spoke a language other than Russian or bought something on the black market. Other prisoners were reported to authorities by someone who was angry or jealous of them for any reason; and still others were implicated by friends, colleagues or acquaintances in response to interrogations about non-existent conspiracies. There were also criminals in the camps, thieves and murderers and sexual predators, who sometimes were allowed to or were used by camp wardens to victimize the political prisoners. And at times there were spouses and children of political prisoners, swept up for the crime of being family members of “an enemy of the people.”The gulag existed from immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution until the collapse of the Soviet Union, though it was at its worst during the reign of Stalin. For many of its original prisoners it was surprisingly familiar because as revolutionaries themselves (Mensheviks, anarchists, socialists, etc.) they had spent time in the czarist prisons. But the Soviet gulag was worse than its czarist model. Periodic purges resulted in mass executions, particularly but not exclusively in the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. For all of Stalin’s reign the work camps were a significant, if totally unsuccessful, part of the Soviet economy. Prisoners were slave labor with unreachable quotas of work to be attained under extreme conditions with crude and inadequate tools. Food rations were close to minimal levels to avoid starvation and those who didn’t meet quotas were fed below minimal level. Disease and death were rampant. During periods of famine and after the Nazi invasion, when conditions were so awful that millions of free Soviet citizens died from cold, starvation, and related diseases, life, of course, was even worse in the camps.Applebaum tries to put verifiable figures on all of this but documentation, the methodology and reliability of record keeping, in the camps makes that challenging. Applebaum’s relentless research and interview efforts are inspiring—if you are wondering how difficult is it to read almost 600 pages of such unimaginable brutality, pause to consider how difficult it is to spend intense years examining the histories, memoirs, documents, and oral accounts of this dark, decades-long era of evil. Pause further to consider how we can adequately understand and remember what happened if all we know is a simple, brief textbook summary? You can’t. Anne Applebaum’s Gulag, A History is essential reading for any meaningful understanding of the 20th century.
—Rick
I was just going to give it five stars and write, "Gulag! Nuff said," but then I thought that might be a little disrespectful to the 28.7 million people who went through the Gulag or related camps, psychiatric hospitals, prisons, exile and deportation, and the somewhere between 10 and 20 million who lost their lives as a result. People were sentenced to years in the Gulag for such "crimes" as being late to work, or because someone informed on them, or for literally nothing at all. Some people were sentenced in the '30s, served their sentences or were released through amnesties during the war, and then were re-arrested in '48 when Stalin began a new wave of repression. They lived in inhuman conditions and were worked to death. The magnitude of the suffering is almost incomprehensible. I could go on, but I'll just say that the book was excellent in readability and scope. It gave me an understanding of a subject that was previously very vague to me. There are still forced labor camps in North Korea and China; they are direct descendants of the Gulag.
—Susie
She's a fine journalist, but she's no historian. It seems well researched, and certainly well-footnoted, but it basically comes across as a mind-numbing tale of how millions of people, represented by a group of selected memoirists, suffered terribly for dubious political/philosophical reasons. I think it's a good attempt at trying to approach a historical era from the point of view of the victims, rather than the perpetrators, but it also shows how difficult that is to carry off. I'm still waiting for the book that can give me what feels like real insight into the phenomenon of early-to-mid-century European social and political tumult. But maybe I will just have to dig it out for myself from fact-packed tomes like this one (given that I'm limited to English-language sources). Also, she does a pretty good job of not letting her own political biases take over (they are there, particularly if you know her background, or are sensitive to clues) but she seems to be letting facts speak for themselves on the whole. I would say, howver, that her conclusions in the epilogue are not well supported. Also, the prose, while certainly readable, can be clunky.
—Joanna
