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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
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"[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
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"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"
Product Description
This landmark book uncovers for the first time in detail one of the greatest horrors of the twentieth century: the vast system of Soviet camps that were responsible for the deaths of countless millions.
Gulag is the only major history in any language to draw together the mass of memoirs and writings on the Soviet camps that have been published in Russia and the West. Using these, as well as her own original research in NKVD archives and interviews with survivors, Anne Applebaum has written a fully documented history of the camp system: from its origins under the tsars, to its colossal expansion under Stalin's reign of terror, its zenith in the late 1940s and eventual collapse in the era of glasnost. It is a gigantic feat of investigation, synthesis and moral reckoning.
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IN THE YEARS 1917, two waves of revolution rolled across Russia, sweeping Imperial Russian society aside as if it were destroying so many houses of cards. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index
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Customer Reviews
Applebaum writes at length about the needless suffering of the hundreds, thousands, and then millions, who were abused, starved, and worked to death daily, under the auspices of the Soviet camp system. Importantly, the individual punishing regimes implemented by the guards and commanders themselves are not ignored, although there is recognition that cruelty and criminality was not universal among them. Having said this, one need look no further for a vision of Hell itself, than to read the depictions of life aboard the transport ships which sailed between the Kamkatchka area and ports such as Vladivostok, built by Gulag labour.
The 'Gulag' itself has become an almost iconic term of oppression and dictatorial power in studies of twentieth century Russia, and what the reader witnesses in Applebaum's book, is the dragging of this Soviet holocaust into the light for all to see. Contrary to the opinions of the obviously misled and misread Mr Podmore, it is not socialism that is portrayed in such excruciatingly horrific detail, but a degenerative communist political system in the guise of Stalinism. Applebaum makes comparisons between the Gulag and the Nazi's system of concentration camps, but reveals such a connection to be inconclusive and limited, the intended ethos of each differing widely from the other.
Applebaum also reveals in her lucid, and painstakingly researched book, much about the rationale behind the Soviet system and its attitude towards its people at all levels, with disgraced ex-party members often occupying cells or camp barracks alongside peasant farmers and criminals, who were commonly favoured by the camp staff. The story of the Gulag is synonymous with that of Stalinism and its immediate aftermath, and it is refreshing to read a book that points equally to the facts that: a) the Gulag spread rapidly under Stalin, its workforce being the pivotal unit in the Five Year Plans, but that: b) the numbers of inmates in the camps wasn't at its highest during the purges of the thirties, but following the Second World War, in fact peaked in the early 1950s.
For a broad and felicitous understanding of twentieth century Russian history, this work is essential. It demonstrates that although corrupt regimes may rise and fall over time, they are ever in the present with regard to their effects on the human psyche. In some respects, Applebaum's book illustrates exactly where the communist dream went wrong in Russia, and where the system's scorn of its own limitations was focused most acutely. It was called the 'Gulag'. Absolutely superb!
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