Gulag: A History

The Gulag was a microcosm of the insanity that was the USSR and Anne Applebaum does an excellent job of attempting to explain it.

Having read dozens of books on the Holocaust over the years, I was surprised at how emotionally draining I found this book. Statistics are inevitable in this subject - and also important: past disputes over the numbers of Stalin's dead (for example by Robert Conquest and his detractors) had to be fought. But Applebaum takes us beyond the numbers into the heartbreaking stories of the individual victims. Making extensive, but not uncritical use, of survivors' memoirs, she brings the horrors of the Gulag into distressingly sharp focus. She also proffers some possible explanations for the Gulag system beyond merely asserting that Stalin was an evil paranoiac (which he undoubtedly was). I was interested to learn, for example, quite how strong the economic motive was for turning hundreds of thousands of innocent people into slave labourers. Stalin and the senior Bolsheviks saw this as a perfectly legitimate way of rapidly developing remote and primitive parts of the Russian hinterland. I now wait, no doubt in vain, for one of the many surviving Western defenders of the Soviet system to admit their grotesque willful blindness and to apologise to its millions of victims.

With the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago" in the early 1970s, Alexander Solzhenitsyn shocked and dismayed the Western world by masterfully detailing the existence of a horrific shadow culture within the Soviet Union, a culture comprised of a mass society of slave laborers scratching out their bare-knuckled survival in unbelievable difficulty and squalor, and having been recruited into the Gulag for a variety of economic, social, and political reasons. Given the inherent limitations of this superb albeit shocking fictional work, the West had to wait for the fall of the Soviet bloc for a more definitive and more complete treatise on the nature of the Gulag. This new book by scholar-turned-journalist Anne Applebaum represents such a work. 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

As a professional historian (although one with no expertise in Eastern Europe), I am impressed with what I fear may be denigrated by the author's ideological opponents as a work of journalism. Applebaum has keen historical imagination, and her research has been remarkably thorough under the circumstances. (She also has a fine writing style; it's a pleasure to watch the care with which she crafts her text.) Applebaum might have made of this work nothing more than a string of horrors, a secular Foxe's Book of Martyrs. That she can communicate the terrifying nature of the Gulag and its incalculable human cost while simultaneously suggesting the larger historical issues is a testimony to her gifts as a historian.