Gulag: A History

Only the Holocaust could match the Gulag's system of repression and punishment, which consisted of a huge variety of Soviet concentration camps and justified evil and institutionalized inhumanity.

The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's epic oral history of the Soviet camps, was published in 1972 and brought the Gulag into the public eye. Numerous memoirs and fresh research addressing various facets of that system have been published in Russia and the West after the fall of the Soviet Union. For the first time, Anne Applebaum has attempted to compile a comprehensive history of the Soviet camp system, from its beginnings in the Russian Revolution to its demise during the glasnost period, using both these new materials and her own unique historical research. The Gulag is now placed in its rightful position at the forefront of our comprehension of the turbulent history of the twentieth century, thanks to an incredible inquiry and moral reckoning effort.

First, Anne Applebaum outlines the camps' historical development as well as the rationale for their expansion and upkeep. When the Russian Revolution occurred in 1918, the Gulag was first established. Stalin himself made the decision to extend the camp system in 1929 in order to take use of the natural riches in the country's scarcely livable far northern areas as well as to employ forced labor to speed up Soviet industrialization. All twelve of the Soviet Union's time zones had labor camps by the end of the 1930s. Throughout the war years, the system kept growing, peaking only in the early 1950s. Approximately eighteen million individuals went through this extensive system between 1929 and Stalin's death in 1953. It is believed that 4.5 million of these 18 million never came back.

However, the Gulag was more than simply a business establishment. With time, it also developed into a nation within a nation, almost a distinct civilization, complete with laws, traditions, literature, folklore, language, and morals all its own. Anne Applebaum also looks at the many aspects of life in this shadow nation, including how the inmates worked, what they ate, where they lived, how they died, and how they managed to survive. She looks at their jailers and guards, the atrocities of traveling in empty cattle cars, the peculiarities of Soviet arrests and trials, the effects of World War II, the interactions between various ethnic and religious groups, escapes, and the remarkable uprisings that occurred in the 1950s. In her last section, she addresses the troubling topic of why, in the collective memory of the former Soviet Union and the West, the Gulag has remained largely unknown.

Gulag: A History will be instantly acclaimed as a seminal piece of historical knowledge and a lasting addition to the difficult, continuous, and essential search for the truth.