Gulag: A History
Gulag: A History, also published as Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, is a non-fiction book covering the history of the Soviet Gulag system. It was written by American author Anne Applebaum and published in 2003 by Doubleday. Gulag won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the 2004 Duff Cooper Prize.[1][2][3] It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle prize and for the National Book Award.[3]
Author
United States
English
Non-fiction Soviet History
Doubleday
2003
679 pp.
The book charts the history of the Gulag organization; from its beginnings under Vladimir Lenin and the Solovki prison camp, to the construction of the White Sea Canal, through its explosive growth in the Great Purge and the Second World War. The book tracks its diminution following the death of Joseph Stalin and its final closure in the 1980s. A large portion of the book is devoted to covering lives and deaths of camp inmates, including their arrest, interrogation, trial, transportation, the details of the rigors of their working and living conditions, the privations of starvation and disease, and the circumstances of their deaths. The book draws heavily on Soviet-era archives and on the diaries and writings of camp survivors, including the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, and Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, among many others.[4]
Background[edit]
The author of the book, Anne Applebaum, has been described as a “historian with a particular expertise in the history of communist and post-communist Europe.”[5] Gulag was Applebaum’s first widely acclaimed publication, followed by Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 published in 2012 and Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine published in 2017. Gulag earned her the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2004.[6]
Though Applebaum was born in Washington D.C., her ancestors immigrated to the U.S. from what is now Belarus.[7] In her book Between East and West, she describes learning about her family’s migration from the Soviet Union to the U.S. at an early age and how surprised she was to be connected to Belarus which she learned was a place with a “shifty, uncertain identity.”[7] As a student in university, she spent the summer of 1985 in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union, and attributes this trip to having shaped her current world views.[8] Applebaum views have been criticized, especially in this book, for being "far enough to the right that conservative reviewers have written fawningly about [it]".[9] In a 2015 article for Commentary magazine, Applebaum concludes about younger people and modern opinions on the Soviet Union: “And because they don’t remember how we undermined the KGB, they aren’t yet prepared to resist the KGB, who are once again dedicating themselves to undermining the rules of the civilized world.”[8] The author's public right-leaning political stance has been criticized for influencing her arguments presented in Gulag.[10][9]
The book is a compilation of first-hand testimonies of what was lived in the Gulag concentration camps, and the author praises Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn along with countless other authors as a source for her investigation and for their ability to “probe beneath the surface of everyday horror and to discover deeper truths about the human condition.”[4]
Overview[edit]
Introduction[edit]
The author opens the book with a quote from Alexander Tvardovsky’s autobiographical poem By Right of Memory, in which he details how all men who arrived at the Gulags were branded as traitors regardless of their social standing or connections.[4] Applebaum’s introduction begins by defining the acronym “Gulag”, meaning “Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerey”, which translates to Main Camp Administration. She also explains that the concept of the “Gulags” began to be used more broadly to refer to the entire Soviet imprisonment system itself, beginning from the arrests to the forced labor, exiles, and deaths. Applebaum describes how Gulags were used to further Stalin’s industrialization and economic plans through their forced labor and how by the end of the 1930s “[the camps] could be found in every one of the Soviet Union's twelve time zones.”[4]
Applebaum argues that the camps as “systems of mass forced labor involving millions of people” disappeared when Stalin died. She explains that from 1929 to Stalin’s death in 1953, an approximate of 18 million people passed through the system of the Gulags. However, she maintains that the camps were transformed and put to use as prisons for democratic activists and criminals well into the 1970s and early 1980s.
Applebaum goes on to compare the atrocities faced in the Nazi camps to those in the Soviet Gulags. She states that “in both societies, the creation of concentration camps was actually the final stage in a long process of dehumanization [...]”.[4] Applebaum notes several distinctions and concludes one of them being that “the soviet camp system as a whole was not deliberately organized to mass-produce corpses [as opposed to the Nazi camps]—even if, at times, it did.”[4] She highlights that it is difficult to compare and contrast these two systems, but that in the study of European history the comparison cannot be ignored. The cross-cultural study can reveal the camps’ developments, conditions, cruelty, and organization.
Part I: The Origins of the Gulag, 1917-1939[edit]
The first part of Gulag covers the takeover of the Bolsheviks after the revolution and Lenin’s initial measures for social control. The author details testimonies of people who were imprisoned during this time, in disorganized prisons left over from the monarchy’s management. Applebaum states that one of the earliest appearances of the term kontslager (or concentration camp) comes in June 4. 1918 from Leon Trotsky.
The emergence of Solovetsky is described by the author as one of utmost significance, not only for its survivors but for its staff and the secret police as well. Applebaum quotes the then system’s chief administrator as claiming “not only that the camp system originated in Solovetsky in 1920, but also that the entire Soviet system of ‘forced labor as a method of re-education ‘began there in 1926’”.[4] She then goes in depth to describe specific testimonies of prisoner’s experiences at the Solovetsky camp.
Critical reception[edit]
In its year of publication, New York Times journalist Steven Merritt Miner wrote of Applebaum’s book: “It is fervently to be hoped that people will read Anne Applebaum's excellent, tautly written and very damning history.”[16] Another positive review came from David Remnick at The New Yorker, stating: “Through copious quotation and anecdote, Applebaum methodically, and unflinchingly, provides a sense of what it was like to enter and inhabit the netherworld of the Gulag” and as drawing on “an impressive range of sources—camp memoirs, literary works, archival material, personal interviews, and histories in a variety of languages.”[17] Remnick praises Applebaum for publishing a book that should be welcomed as a comprehensive work on the lesser-know subject of Gulags (as opposed to the Holocaust). On a review for Booklist published by the American Library Association, author Jay Freeman writes: "With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the gradual opening of KGB archives, the full horror of the Gulag is gradually emerging, and Applebaum has done a masterful job of chronicling the origin, growth, and eventual end of this monstrous system."[18] Robert Service, in a piece for The Guardian, wrote that "she tells a gripping and convincing story about the Soviet camp system".[19]
In a review published by the Santa Clara Law Review, attorney Dana Neacşu noted that, according to Applebaum, the "Gulag was a mirror image of the Soviet society" and the Soviet labor camp system and the Nazi concentration camps were very similar. Hence she "indicted the entire Soviet system by association"[10] The reviewer disagreed with such conclusions.