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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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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gulag,
By A Customer
This review is from: Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (Paperback)
A powerfully engrossing and thought provoking boook in sharing the history and personal perspective (prisoner, criminal, jailor) etc of the Soviet Gulag system. Well researched and even balanced with countless notes, personal accounts. etc. A must read
25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A good survey but with problems,
By willliam nowak (Braintree, Essex) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (Paperback)
To the English reader who does not know the history of the camps, or who has not read the many memoirs published about them, this is a very useful survey. It gives a clear account of the origins and development of the Gulag system and uses the memoir literature to describe the organization of work and daily life within the camps, and to bring to life the suffering of the millions of people inside them. As with any general survey, there is a problem, however, with stereotyping - and this book is guilty on that score. It does not take account of the many different types of camps, not all quite the horror story presented uniformly in this book. And it tends to accept at face value the reminscences of the camp inmates, without questioning the extent to which their memoirs (written for the most part in the period after 1956) were accurate. Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is better in this sense, because it represents these memories in a direct way, as oral history, and that is still the best account of the Gulag.
33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
OF TUNDRA, MINES AND HUMAN WASTE.,
By Northangerland "Csejthe" (England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (Paperback)
Anne Applebaum's 'Gulag' is a literary and historiographical vanguard. 'Gulag', at last, recognises the necessity for the acknowledgement and understanding of a political system that demanded the wholesale and tragically meaningless disownment and butchering of entire communities. Even entire races, when we consider, for example, Kruschev's hatred of, and intentions towards the Chechens; something trodden over and often overlooked in the haste with which some historians rush to appraise the figure of Stalin. 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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