I believe Applebaum really tried in her search of the truth about the Gulag, the famous, or rather infamous labor camp infrastructure of communist Russia. I enjoyed this book despite its morbid subject and thought it was a good piece of scholarly work. I do have a bias toward Solgen Nietzschen's 2 volume rendition, seeing as how he is a brilliant writer and was actually a prisoner of the Gulag. Bottom-line: This is a great book and would be a great companion to Solgen Nietzschen's 2 volume Gulag.

Miso ( )

A powerful and important book. ( )

While this is a big book, and the early chapters, discussing the bad things which went on in Stalin's gulags, are not fun to read, the book is actually very interesting when it gets to discussing how the labor camps came to end and how they are viewed by Russians today. This is an important book, since the world should know of and deprecate the awfulness of Stalin's slave labor camps, fueled by the terrible injustices customarily dealt out by the Stalin system. It won the Pulitzer prize for nonfiction for 2004, and is the 25th such winner I have read. ( )

Applebaum's history of the Gulag is encyclopedic and for that reason is exhausting to read. She shows the evolution of the institution from a (by later standards, gentle) prison for politicals who offered competition to the Bolsheviki, through a slave labor system for building actual Socialism, through a stage where the Gulag played a key role in the terror campaign against all elements of the Soviet population before subsiding once more into a slave labor system, this time for the unfortunates caught up in the Great Patriotic War.

Applebaum then explores step by step the elements of the Gulag from arrest orders through interrogation, "trial", transport and emprisonment. In this section she clearly shows how a regime that places no value on human lives as anything beyond units of labor debases all it touches. ( )

Applebaum writes a stuffed book about one of the Soviet Union’s worst things – to lock people up on very dubious accounts.
This heavy book ought to be an eye-opener for everyone. At least myself had not grasped the width – and the organisation – of these crimes (against humanity?) committed in the name of communism!

The historian Applebaum writes well, easily accessible. But still, something is missing. I can’t put my finger on it, but perhaps it is a bit of passion, or force I crave. But sure – it is awful things she brings to light.
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Applebaum skriver en späckad bok om ett av Sovejtunionens värsta företeelser - att spärra in folk på mycket grumliga grunder.
Denna tunga skrift borde vara en ögonöppnare för alla. Åtminstone jag hade inte koll på vidden - och systematiseringen - av dessa i kommunismens namn begågna brott (mot mänskligheten?)!

Historikern Applebaum skriver bra, lättillgängligt. Men ändå fattas något. Jag har svårt att sätta fingret på det, men kanske är det lite glöd, eller driv jag saknar. Men visst - det är ju förfärliga (i ordets rätta bemärkelse) saker hon tar upp. ( )