Gulag: A History [Hardcover]

As it happened, however, the documents were not destroyed; they remained locked away in files and archives. Nor did Solzhenitsyn foresee the coming of Mikhail Gorbachev and the advent of glasnost, his policy of openness, much less the unfettered availability of Gulag information and the flood of memoirs by camp survivors.

It was an American Sovietologist-turned-journalist, Anne Applebaum, now a Washington Post columnist, who embraced the unexpected opportunity to undertake this vast and daunting project from which whole universities of ordinary researchers might have slunk away in dismay.

Lenin himself, the founding father of Russian communism, established the first 84 camps of the Soviet Gulag almost immediately after the Russian Revolution, basing their design on tsarist precedents. Lenin's successor, Josef Stalin, presided over the Gulag's development into the far-reaching "archipelago" of which Solzhenitsyn wrote.

Transport to the camps was no less nightmarish in many cases than the camps themselves. Prisoners en route to distant camps are said to have frozen to death even before they were loaded into the cattle cars, where they would sometimes remain crowded together for more than a month. Memoirs tell of trains being stopped to take off corpses, which were thrown into ditches.

The struggle for survival was part of daily life in the camps, the struggle for bits of food, edible but often revolting, and for enough water to sustain life. In many camps, hardened criminals were part of the general population of politicals and other "enemies" who had committed no crime other than happening to have been born into the family of a relatively successful farmer. The criminals stole, murdered and raped as they pleased, often with the passive approval of the guards.

The Gulag's growth continued throughout World War II and into the early 1950s, by which time there were 476 distinct camp complexes comprising thousands of individual camps. The number of prisoners in each camp ranged from hundreds to thousands. From 1929, when the Gulag began its major expansion, until 1953, when Stalin died, some 18 million people passed through the camp system. More than three million of them perished.

Comparatively few of the Gulag prisoners (zeks) had been criminals in the conventional sense of the word. Some of them were arrested because a neighbor had heard them pass along an unfortunate joke or laugh at one, some because they had been seen engaging in "suspicious" behavior, and others were reported for having been ten minutes late for work or owning four cows in a village where other families owned only one. Some were members of a population category --- Poles, Balts, Chechens, Tartars, etc. --- that had suddenly fallen into disfavor. Immigrants were always suspect, as were ordinary Soviet citizens with foreign connections --- stamp collectors, Esperanto enthusiasts, anyone having relatives abroad, or a returned POW. In short, the smallest statistical possibility of guilt was sufficient cause for arrest and conviction.

In 1937, the secret police launched an all-out campaign to extirpate a Polish spy ring allegedly operating in the Soviet Union. The secret police arrest order, which included virtually everyone of Polish background living on Soviet soil, specified that investigation was to begin at the time of arrest, not before, as a means of expediting the process.

This transposition of procedural steps, Applebaum explains, meant the arrestees themselves would be forced to provide the evidence upon which the case against them would be built. More bluntly, she says, they were to be beaten or otherwise tortured until they "confessed" the role they had played in the apparently fictitious spy ring. Their testimony naturally implicated others, who were also arrested and similarly forced to confess whatever acts of espionage they could imagine having committed.

One of the larger questions with which Applebaum grapples is whether the Gulag system developed haphazardly, through simple accretion in response to a need for additional space for prisoners, or as part of an elaborate plan. Was it intended primarily as storage space for undesirable elements in Soviet society, or as an apparatus for collecting slave laborers and putting them to work on projects, such as the White Sea Canal and the opening of the Siberian north?

Scholars disagree, and evidence seems to support both sides. On the one hand, Peter the Great, whom Stalin obsessively admired, used serfs and prison labor to accomplish enormous construction projects at relatively little expense. Planned or not, the Gulag became immensely important as a source of virtually free labor. A Soviet historian has identified a correlation between the successful economic activity of the camps and the number of prisoners sent to them. His book also points out that sentences for petty crime became much harsher at a time when more prison laborers were urgently needed. Another example: In March 1934 the head of the secret police, G.G. Yagoda, wrote to subordinates in Ukraine ordering them to produce 15,000-20,000 prisoners, all fit to work, to help complete work on the Moscow-Volga Canal.

As pure history, GULAG is a major achievement. It also fulfills the moral imperative to expose, document, and record in service to the collective memory the fate of so many millions of human beings torn from their families who suffered and died in hostile places far from their homes. Fittingly, Applebaum's book is dedicated to her predecessors who described what had happened and thereby made possible this monumental work.

--- Reviewed by Hal Cordry

This large volume is managed very shrewdly by the author, with neatly segmented chapters covering many aspects of the Gulag. Chapter by chapter Applebaum covers the Gulag system from several angles: the people and their sufferings in the system, aspects of the system as a bureaucratic institution, historical evolutions in the Gulag, and the people and institutions who ran this sprawling enterprise.

The beginnings, depths, and dismantling of the Gulag are other main themes in this book. We also learn how in many regards the sad legacy of the Gulag seems to have emanated from certain characteristics of the nature of incarceration in Russia, and that the system, sadly, has not completely disappeared.

While a historical account, this book almost reads at time as a (sad) novel. There are fascinating insights into how people perservered and surived in what seems the most hopeless of existences. Within the over-arching evil of the system, evil existed in various degrees and some camps were worse than others. A revelation to this reader was the use of the criminal element within the Gulag as a tool to manage the non-criminal, political inmates. Equally, revealing was the ulimate contribution of the Gulag in fomenting the criminal element in the U.S.S.R. The system saw its insurrections and did not always oppress without sparking reaction from the inmate population.

There is no shortage of interesting (though perhaps often disagreeable) characters in this book. People learn once again of the vastness of Russia, and how the country was such a crossroads for people of so many races and nations whose lives were unsettled so tragically in the Gulag. One learns, for example, how the Gulag created ethnic Eskimo bounty-hunters (for escapees), how nearly entire races of people were displaced by the system, how age old foes of Russia found so many of its citizens trapped in the Gulag. Especially sad was how inmates even entered the system from outside the U.S.S.R. as part of the deals made during the Second World War with the West's Stalinist ally. And of course the book covers the exporting of the Gulag to the Eastern-block countries occurs as an outgrowth of Soviet expansion following the Second World War.

After reading this book, the reader sees how this monstrous system transcended borders and dealt crippling disruptions to the lives of millions who at least managed to survive (and death to the millions who perished in the system). And as always one sees the vastness of Russia itself as a vast island-like prison during the Gulag era. This book takes the reader from the Solevetsky Islands near Finland to the Sea of Japan. One learns of people whose lives as components of the Gulag system enter and exit the system from and to places as distant as Palestine and India.

"Gulag" is a fasinating and thoroughly researched book that I highly recommend.

The work is both massive and comprehensive, dealing not only with the ways in which the Gulag came into existence and then thrived under the active sponsorship of Lenin and Stalin, but also with a plethora of aspects of life within the Gulag, ranging from its laws, customs, folklore, and morality on the one hand to its slang, sexual mores, and cuisine on the other. She looks at the prisoners themselves and how they interacted with each other to the relationships between the prisoners and the many sorts of guards and jailers that kept them imprisoned. For what forced the Gulag into becoming a more or less permanent fixture within the Soviet system was its value economically in producing goods and services that were marketable both within the larger Soviet economy as well as in international trade. As it does in China today, forced labor within the Gulag for the Soviets represented a key element in expanding markets for Soviet-made goods ranging from lamps to those prototypically Russian fur hats.

The Gulag came into being as a result of the Communist elite's burning desire for purges of remaining vestiges of bourgeoisie aspects of Soviet culture, and its consequent need for some deep dark hole to stick unlucky cultural offenders into to remove them semi-permanently from the forefront of the Soviet society. Stalin found it useful to expand the uses of the camp system to enhance industrial growth, and the camps became flooded with millions of Soviets found wanting in terms of their ultimate suitability for everyday life in the workers' paradise. Thus, the Gulag flourished throughout the 1920s and 1930s and even through the years of WWII, when slave labor provided an invaluable aid in producing enough war goods to help defeat the Axis powers. By the peak years of Gulag culture in the 1950s, the archipelago stretched into all twelve of the U.S. S. R.'s time zones, although it was largely concentrated in the northernmost and least livable aspects of the country's vast geographical areas.

One of the most interesting and certainly more controversial aspects of the book can be found in its consideration of the relative obscurity with which both the existence and horrors associated with the Gulag has been treated to date. Compared to the much more extensively researched and discussed Holocaust of Europe's Jewish population perpetrated by the Nazi Third Reich over a twelve year period, almost nothing is known about the nearly seventy reign of the Gulag. Given the fairly recent demise of the Soviet state, and the dawning availability of data revealing the particulars of the existence of the Soviet system of political imprisonment, forced labor camps, and summary executions, one expects this massively documented, exhaustively detailed, and memorably written work will serve as the standard in the field for decades to come. This is a terrific book, and one I can heartily recommend to any serious student of 20th century history. Enjoy!