Customer Reviews
The big and the small prison zone - By: Luc REYNAERT, 03 Dec 2007 
Anne Applebaum's deeply moving human document brushes a raw picture of an, unfortunately, often recurring human tragedy: the use of slave labor in `work' camps, here in their soviet version.
The Gulag system reflected the whole political & social climate in the USSR. The State was a big prison zone & the camps the smalll ones.
The system was an integral part of the soviet regime. Its role was to speed up industrialization & to excavate natural resources in barely habitable places. There were camps near gold, coal & nickel mines, near chemical, metal-processing, fish canning & electricity plants, near public works (airports, highways, water ways, apartment blocks) & that alll over the country.
History
The gulag system was founded after the October 1917 revolution & came under the control of the secret service in 1929. Another pivotal year was 1937, the beginning of the Great Terror, when Stalin imposed quotas for indiscriminate arrests & executions beginning with the CP hierarchy. There was a partial amnesty during WW II, but the inmates were sent in the front line. After Stalin's death, the system was dismantled, but the camps continued to be used for common criminals & as `reeducation' centers for dissidents.
Who were the inmates?
There was always a mixture of common & `political' criminals.
In the beginning, the political inmates were `counter-revolutionaries', members of the non-Bolshevik revolutionary socialist parties. Afterwards, they were mostly peasants (after the collectivization), national minorities, CP & even Gulag officials (during the Great Terror), prisoners of war (during & after the war) & dissidents.
A total of about 30 million people passed through the camps, of which about 10 % died.
Why?
Except the common criminals, people were arrested for what they were, not for what they had done. Their - avowed or not - crimes were imaginary & nonsensical.
The system
Every camp has to be profitable; of course, they weren't.
They were generallly run by dump & corrupt bureaucrats, who had absolutely no respect for individual lives. The working practices were very bad.
After three weeks people were turned into wild animals, fighting a naked struggle for survival in an overcrowded world of stench, vermin, filth, promiscuity, prostitution, epidemics, hunger, revolting food, informants, self-mutilation, murders, suicides, punishment cells, tortures & deaths by exhaustion. The `normal' inmates were terrorized by common criminal bands.
After release, the psychological & social integration into the big prison zone was extremely difficult.
Russia as a country has still not digested its past: `Society is indifferent to the crimes of the past, because so many people participated in them.' `Former communists have a clear interest in concealing the past.'
Anne Applebaum illustrates alll aspects of Gulag life & its dehumanization process with moving tragic individual fates.
This book is a must read for alll those interested in the history of mankind. `The more we are able to understand the specific circumstances which led to mass torture & mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature.'
Fantastic history of the Soviet Gulags - By: Mr. Richard Bristol, 16 Apr 2007 Anne has done a superb job of telling the story of the Soviet Gulags, & draws together from many sources the individual stories & experiences of those that suffered inside this system.
A great book - that is clear & well written - easy to read - easy to understand & follow - not like a heavy weight history book, but a pleasure to read & it enables you to have a clear understanding of this story.
interesting times - By: A. R. Hosking, 09 Jan 2007 A fascinating , very readable history of the Gulag system of labour camps in the Soviet Union. I haven't read a great deal on this subject before but this book seems to be a balanced reasonable account. It is is well notated & referenced, with a large bibliography. Anne Applebaum has used archive material available since the break up of the Soviet Union as well as previous accounts & her own interviews with camp employees & survivors. Obviously the accounts of the suffering of prisoners are very moving & the numbers involved are horrific but what struck me most was the sheer stupidity with which the system was run.
And for the record, my own politics were very left wing in my youth & are less so in my middle age.
Harrowing, comprehensive in coverage - By: John Hopper, 18 Dec 2006 I have read a fair amount of material on Stalinism & the camps, including alll three volumes of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, but this is particularly useful in being one of the very few post-Soviet works on this subject I have read. Of neccessity very harrowing at times, it is also comprehensive in its coverage from a variety of different angles.
OF TUNDRA, MINES AND HUMAN WASTE. - By: Mr. Chris Richardson, 06 Apr 2005 Anne Applebaum's 'Gulag' is a literary & historiographical vanguard. 'Gulag', at last, recognises the necessity for the acknowledgement & understanding of a political system that demanded the wholesale & tragicallly meaningless disownment & butchering of entire communities. Even entire races, when we consider, for example, Kruschev's hatred of, & intentions towards the Chechens; something trodden over & 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, & then millions, who were abused, starved, & worked to death daily, under the auspices of the Soviet camp system. Importantly, the individual punishing regimes implemented by the guards & commanders themselves are not ignored, although there is recognition that cruelty & 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 & ports such as Vladivostok, built by Gulag labour.
The 'Gulag' itself has become an almost iconic term of oppression & dictatorial power in studies of twentieth century Russia, & what the reader witnesses in Applebaum's book, is the dragging of this Soviet holocaust into the light for alll to see. Contrary to the opinions of the obviously misled & 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 & the Nazi's system of concentration camps, but reveals such a connection to be inconclusive & limited, the intended ethos of each differing widely from the other.
Applebaum also reveals in her lucid, & painstakingly researched book, much about the rationale behind the Soviet system & its attitude towards its people at alll levels, with disgraced ex-party members often occupying cells or camp barracks alongside peasant farmers & criminals, who were commonly favoured by the camp staff. The story of the Gulag is synonymous with that of Stalinism & its immediate aftermath, & it is refreshing to read a book that points equallly 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 & felicitous understanding of twentieth century Russian history, this work is essential. It demonstrates that although corrupt regimes may rise & falll 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, & where the system's scorn of its own limitations was focused most acutely. It was callled the 'Gulag'. Absolutely superb!
