Gulag: A History

I started GULAG once, got so depressed that I set it aside, and then picked it up and read it through again. Anne Applebaum’s work is more of a straightforward history that Solzhenitsyn’s personal memoir The GULAG Archipelago; Applebaum, of course, had access to historic records of the XSSR while Solzhenitsyn had to depend on his own and other inmate’s memories.


GULAG is organized in three sections (plus Introduction and Epilogue) – the history of the camp system up to its height, the experiences of the prisoners, and the decline and disappearance of the GULAG. The first camp was set up in the Solovetsky Islands – an actual GULAG archipelago in the White Sea. And, initially, it wasn’t that bad – prisoners could get show more packages, they had a library, they organized theatrical groups. Things went downhill (this is a recurring theme – things in the GULAG always got worse throughout its history) – Stalin became convinced that the camps could actually be productive – and slave labor began to be used for all sorts of projects; the White Sea Canal; the industrial complexes of Vorkuta, Norilsk, and Ukhta; the “scientist” camps where people like Korolev and Tupolev were put to work as weapons designers; and the most infamous, the gold mines at Kolyma. Stalin apparently actually believed his own propaganda – when the camps didn’t produce at the expected rate, the camp administrators were shot, another round of slaves was arrested and transported, and the new set of administrators were instructed to crack down even harder. (Apparently under the principal that “Beatings will continue until morale improves”). Economic statistics from the XSSR are meaningless – the best bet, though, is that the camps were worse than useless; they cost the XSSR more than they produced. (Applebaum mentions in an aside that although the camps were horribly run and inefficient, everything in the XSSR was horribly run and inefficient; the camp administrators lied about their productivity, but every manager in the XSSR lied about productivity. It’s therefore difficult to tell how bad the camps were compared to the rest of the XSSR economy).


Prisoner’s stories are reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov; the knock on the door in the middle of the night; interrogation; sometimes a kangaroo trial; transport, and the camp. Interrogation, surprisingly, usually wasn’t that physically brutal; some of the memoirists were threatened with beating but few actually were. There was psychological torture in abundance, of course; sleep deprivation was common. Interestingly, people who held out and refused to confess sometimes did benefit in the long run – slight reductions (7 years instead of 10, for example) in sentence were possible if there was no confession in a prisoner’s file.


Transit to the camps was brutal. On one shipment of about 20,000 prisoners to Kolyma, about half died on the trains before they got there. Political prisoners were introduced to criminals during transport; criminals were always considered socially superior (as members of the downtrodden proletariat) to politicals, and were therefore used to keep the politicals in line and prevent them from annoying the wardens and guards with things like petitions, letters, and illness claims. The criminals stole the “politicals” clothes and food, and generally intimidated them with threats of violence. Juvenile criminals were apparently the worst.


There were ships from Vladivostok to Magadan, the port for the Kolyma gold fields; these were especially bad for women, since while separate trains were used for male and female prisoners they were only separated by a wire mesh on the ships. Criminal prisoners could make holes through the mesh over the course of the voyage; the result was called “riding the tram” and is one of the most horrifying images Applebaum depicts.


Once in the camps it was survival of the fittest. A few prisoners managed to retain some semblance of humanity, but it was mostly dog-eat-dog. “Norms” for work – so many tons of coal cut, so many cubic meters of earth moved – were conscientiously violated as prisoners did everything they could to keep alive. Rations were supposedly set according to work produced, but there were all sorts of ways around that once you knew the ropes, usually by bribing another prisoner with food to show them how. Women and young boys had certain advantages – if you could call it that.


Applebaum repeats a theme of Solzhenitsyn – many of the prisoners remained “good Communists” and imagined that some sort of horrible mistake had been made and as soon as it was brought to the attention of Comrade Stalin it would be corrected. Some punishment schemes in the camps were particularly intended to work against this – prisoners were forbidden to call each other “Comrade”, were forbidden to be called “Stakhanovites” or “shock workers” if they exceeded their work norms, and were forbidden to possess a picture of Stalin. A common Western meme is that these were “reeducation” camps where prisoners would be subject to political lectures with the intent of turning them into good Soviet citizens; although some of that did go on in the very early camps it was quickly abandoned. “Labor” was supposed to reeducate you all by itself, with the occasional sloganeering wall poster.


Applebaum notes that while most of the camp memoirs are by “intellectuals” – people who had some higher education – these never made up more than a few percent of camp populations. Most of the inmates were peasants, particularly the “kulaks” enslaved during the agricultural collectivization of the middle 1930s. There was typically no love lost between these and the “politicals” (although, technically, a peasant prisoner was usually a “political” as well, having made an unfortunate joke about Stalin or having one more cow than average). Appelbaum cites a case of a group of female “intellectual” prisoners, unable to even remotely approach their work norm (they only made 3%) and thus put on starvation rations, who approached the norm setter and begged for easier work. They might have got it if they hadn’t mentioned that they were good Soviets and party members. “Party members?” replied the norm setter. “The party dragged me out of my hut and left my six children to starve. If you were prostitutes, I’d give you a job as window washers and you could make your norm. But as party members, go out and dig your nine cubic meters of good Soviet dirt.”


Applebaum does stress that these were not Auschwitz-style death camps. Soviet authorities were not actually trying to kill prisoners – it just worked out that way. There were, in fact, frequent inspections by authorities from Moscow who often angrily reported that camp administrators were incompetent, that production statistics were meaningless, that prisoners’ food was stolen, that prisoners’ work was inferior and had to be repaired or redone. All the reports went into the files; now and then some minor administrator got fired (and often went to the camps himself) but overall nothing was done. The camps were just a microcosm – or maybe a minicosm – of Soviet society; just as inefficient and incompetent and futile. The guards and camp administrators that let prisoners die weren’t “evil” in the Nazi sense; just indifferent.


The GULAG records list about 25,000 “escapes”. Some escapes, usually to Finland, were successful during the very early days when most of the camps were located in the Komi or Karelia areas and food was more abundant. After that it was mostly criminals who escaped; if they could reach a town there would be a criminal underworld to support them. A common criminal escape tactic was to go in groups of three; two criminal friends and a naïve third who ended up as travel rations. Noncriminal prisoners who escaped would find themselves in Siberia with no food and kilometers from the nearest town; some of the more remote camps didn’t even bother with barbed wire. And, finally, what was the point? If you got out of the camp, you were still in the Soviet Union – sometimes called “the big prison” in camp jargon. Applebaum notes that one of the most famous escape stories, The Long Walk, is almost certainly spurious.


Post WII, the general character of the inmates changed – more “nationals” (Ukrainians, Poles, Balts, and Chechens); more ex-Red Army (anybody who had been a German POW automatically went to the camps; anyone who had actually entered a foreign country – Poland, Germany, etc. – with the Red Army was suspect, having been “corrupted”); fewer other “politicals”. The nationals and the Red Army men showed more solidarity than previous inmates, and by and large put an end to the domination of the camps by criminals; in one case a criminal boss who attempted the usual terror tactics against other prisoners made the mistake of trying this on a group of ex-Red Army prisoners in a logging camp. He “accidentally” fell into a log chipper; when the Red Army men returned to camp they informed the criminals that things had changed. The criminal second-in-command attempted to continue criminal authority; the rest of the criminals presented his head to the Red Army men as a peace offering and there was no further trouble. Eventually, the authorities actually had to abandon the criminals-as-enforcers technique and criminals were moved to separate camps for their own protection. Applebaum comments several GULAG survivors she interviewed warned her that just because somebody was is a camp didn’t necessarily mean they were an innocent victim of Stalinist oppression.

The GULAG system continued to grow until the death of Stalin. His initial successor, Beria (who probably had the best data on how counterproductive the camps actually were), immediately dismantled many of the grandiose projects – railways and highway to nowhere, and a tunnel to Sakhalin Island. Beria was, of course, quickly replaced by Khrushchev and oppression in the camps relaxed somewhat. As is often the case, this actually sometimes made things worse for the authorities; it’s easier to revolt and protest when you’re not sick and starving. There were disturbances at various camps, including an outright revolt in Kazakhstan that had to be suppressed with tanks. However, the number of new inmates coming in dropped – criminals went to more conventional prisons, “politicals” were much more likely to be punished by loss of status than imprisonment, and there were gradual amnesty programs.


The Introduction and Epilogue are, in some ways, the most moving parts of the book. The introduction includes a cri de coeur (also voiced by Martin Amis in Koba the Dread) – why is anyone ex-Nazi treated with revulsion and contempt, but ex-Communists (for that matter, still-Communists) get a free pass? There’s no really good answer; the best she can come up with is a quote by a puzzled western Leftist: “Hitler was evil, but the Soviet Union was … deformed” – as if it were an attempt to breed some new animal variety that didn’t work out. (The subtle, and dreadful, undertone being that maybe if we try it a few more times we’ll get it right). Similarly, the Epilogue notes how quickly both Russia and the West have forgotten the camps. There’s an organization (“Memorial”) in Moscow that tries to document them; now and then another mass grave turns up somewhere, but mostly it’s ancient history. Applebaum sadly comments that many in the West think the Cold War was a “mistake” and that the principal villain of the time was Joe McCarthy, not the other Joe; and that “GULAG deniers” have much more visibility in Western culture than Holocaust deniers.


The last section is a numerical appendix; of course everybody is interested in “how many”. As already noted, XSSR statistics are highly suspect; deaths in interrogation and in transit usually weren’t recorded; many camps released inmates just before they died of starvation so the deaths wouldn’t go on the records; and some prisoners were just plain lost. The best estimate is at their height (the early 1950s) there were about 2,500,000 prisoners in the GULAG; the total number of people that went through the system was around 18,000,000; about 2,700,000 died. The worst years for the camps reflected the XSSR as a whole; during the famine of 1933, about 15% of camp inmates died and the figure for 1942 was an astonishing 25%. These death rates, coupled with the fact that the overall camp population never decreased by more than a percent or so, give some idea of the throughput.


It’s just as enlightening to reflect on what Applebaum doesn’t include (she mentions these, but says each would take a whole book on its own): mass starvation during the collectivization famines; the WWII and post-WWII POW camps; and the general dismal purgatory of the Soviet Union. The book should be required reading for every naïve socialist. show less

Incredibly intense and dense in details, this book is undoubtedly one of the best scholarships on the Russian gulags. I am in awe of the author's ability to capture the immense scope of all that the gulags were and represented, while also presenting the various anecdotal accounts from first-hand memoirs, distilling all the information to their very essence without losing any of the pathos.

Throughout the book, it is a constant reminder that the terrifying histories that we do have records of mostly come from survivor accounts. They had suffered through all these extreme inhumane conditions, which begs the horrifying question, what about the ones we never hear about? It is therefore all the more important for these stories to be recorded show more and passed down to later generations so that the survivors who described what happened - and those who never got the chance - will never be forgotten.

Recommended for history buffs and/or even readers of Russian (Soviet or pre-Soviet or even post-Soviet) literature: it is impossible to fully appreciate Russian literature without understanding this very important part of Russian history as even though the gulags as we nowadays understand them only really existed in the Soviet era, they had been a part of the Russian life since the seventeenth century in the form of forced-labour brigades. show less

I can’t say enough good things about this book. Anne Applebaum has taken advantage of recent archive openings in Russia and conducted thorough and detailed research of the newly available material. Her findings are changing the way people think about the Soviet Gulag system. In the past, most historians had to rely on survivor memoirs and the classic history, The Gulag Archipelago, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn for their information. I think this caused a bias toward the point of view and experience of dissident writers. Applebaum’s use of newly opened archives allows her to uncover the government’s agenda, statistics, and methods; as well as prisoner records, including those of criminals, non-political prisoners, and collaborators show more who were less likely to share their stories. The result is a new perspective, one that Applebaum thoughtfully and articulately explores.

The first and last sections are chronological in structure, but in the middle section, Applebaum chose to break her material into topics, such as punishment and reward, guards, and women and children. These sections are particularly descriptive and evocative of life in the camps. In addition, I found her comparison of Nazi concentration camps and Soviet labor camps concise and convincing. Her explication of the Gulag as a deliberate and organized economic system was eye-opening: the extent to which the Soviets were willing to go to create and maintain such a system, even in the face of obvious losses, was shocking. I also learned how erroneous I was in my preconception that the Gulag was populated primarily by political prisoners.

Although I found the introduction to sound a bit like a graduate student’s paper, the rest of the book was engrossing and highly readable. I only wish there had been more photos, especially of some of the Central Asian camps. In any case, I highly recommend this Pulitzer Prize winning book. show less

During its more than 60 years of operation, more than 30 million people passed through the Gulag, millions of them never to return. I first became interested in the topic through the writings of Solzhenitsin, and my interest was reignited a few years ago when I read The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes (which I highly recommend, by the way, despite the recent revelations of Figes' unethical and possibly illegal actions).

Applebaum's book begins with a chronological overview of the system, which existed even in Tsarist times. In its second section, the book explores every aspect of the Gulag experience, from arrest, to interrogation, to trial, to transportation to the camps (during which there was a high show more mortality rate), to actual life in the camps. Life in the camps is explored from the point of view of the prisoners and the administrators. The prisoners themselves were a diverse group--the politicals and the actual criminals, prisoners of war and other foreigners. The experiences of women prisoners uniquely included sexual abuse, as well as childbirth.

Applebaum was the first to utilize the newly released official archives of the Soviet Gulag administration, and so she is able to explore not only the personal experiences of day-to-day life in the camps, but also the how's and why's of the existence of the Gulag itself. For example, she thoroughly analyzes the issue of the underlying purposes of the Gulag. Was it intended to remove undesireable elements from society, whether politicals or true criminals, or was it merely a device to obtain slave labor? The Gulag system was indeed a large portion of the Soviet economic system, and there is ample evidence that the Soviets used the system to colonize remote and hostile regions of the country, as well as to exploit the valuable natural resources of those areas, but there is also evidence of Stalin's paranoia. Applebaum also ponders the controversial issue of why for so many years the crimes against humanity resulting from this system were all but ignored, even as memorials were raised for Holocaust victims.

This is an important book, because as compelling as the individual survivor memoirs are, they do not present the whole picture. This book undertakes to give us the universal as well as the personal. It is compellingly readable in addition to being academically documented, and I highly recommend it.. show less

Gulag is an eye-opening thought-provoking, comprehensive, nuanced, and readable examination of the Soviet Union's network of forced labor camps, from their origins in 1917 in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution (with a look back at earlier Russian uses of slave labor and exile), through their rise and fall, largely under Stalin, to their adaptations in the 1980s eras of glasnost and perestroika. Applebaum had access to secret Soviet documents preserved in their archives, the records Gulag administrators needed to keep to operate the camps (as opposed to the more public political reports), but what makes this book so compelling is not only her impressive scholarship but also her quotes from the prisoners themselves -- show more from their memoirs, from interviews, and from literary works. Their testimony, and the quotes from poets and other writers that begin each chapter, bring life to grim, and still not well known, evil of the 20th century.

Applebaum brackets a lengthy middle section on prisoners' experiences in the camps -- from arrest, prison, and transport to food and living quarters, work, punishment, survival strategies, and rebellion, with special looks at guards, women and children, and the dying -- with historical sections covering the periods 1917 to 1939 and 1940 to 1986. This allows her to delve into the actual lives of prisoners while also exploring the political, historical, and economic forces behind the origins, expansion, and fall of the camps. Without fanfare or drama, she vividly illustrates both the magnitude and the telling details of the monstrosity that was the Gulag This is essential and horrifying.

In the introduction and final chapters, Applebaum tries to put the Gulag, and her history of it, in context. She analyzes some of the reasons why the evils of the forced labor camps, particularly at their peak under Stalin, are not as well known in the west, nor taken as seriously, as the evils of the Nazis and Hitler. She explores the attitudes of contemporary Russians and people from neighboring countries (those that were part of the former Soviet Union and those that were under its domination) towards remembering, documenting, and studying the camps. She points out that this lack of interest in remembering can have consequences in the present, citing in particular the Chechen experience. She notes that she doesn't discuss the parallel system of internal exile, which affected millions more people and their families.

And, reluctantly and with many caveats, she takes a stab at the numbers, estimating that some 18 million Soviet citizens passed through the camps between 1929 and 1953 and that there were also perhaps 6 million exiles, 4 million POWs, and 700,000 postwar detainees, for a total of 28.7 million people who experienced the camps. She explains that there are so many ways of looking at the question of how many died, and such inadequate data, that it is difficult to come up with totals. In the camps themselves? More than 2.7 million. In political executions, more, maybe a lot more, than 786,000. Under the entire Soviet regime, "unnecessary" deaths are "pure conjecture," but could range anywhere from 10 or 12 to 20 million.

In the end, Applebaum focuses on humanity and the individual. Noting that "statistics can never fully describe what happened. Neither can the archival documents on which so much of this book has been based," she gives the "last word" to a writer and former camp inmate, Lev Razgon, who, upon seeing his own archival file at the age of 82, wrote: "I can remember and recall them, each one. And if I remained alive, then it is my duty to do so." show less

From a historical perspective, Gulag is an in-depth treatise on the creation, evolution and eventual dismantling of the immense Soviet concentration camps that became known as the Gulag. Far from a set system, the Gulag evolved with the changing needs of the Soviet Union – or the changing moods of Stalin – resulting in dramatic differences from era to era, or even camp to camp. Anne Applebaum writes a detailed accounting of the entire Gulag system from beginning to end. A commendable work of scholarship, Gulag misses no detail. However, it does fail to make an emotional connection to the prisoners who lived and often died in a system that didn’t make sense, even to its creators. Instead, it reads like a ledger, cataloging the show more arrests, camps, deaths and incidents without ever really letting us inside the lives of the people who brought about a concentration camp system that lasted for half a century. Gulag provides an understanding of a system that dominated Soviet Russia, but much like the Soviet system itself, it does lack any humanity. show less

This is a thorough and absorbing history of the Soviet concentration camp system that would come to be known as the Gulag. Applebaum has obviously done extensive research and the book is well-written, extremely informative and nuanced. It’s clearly organized and reads smoothly. Applebaum first looks at the development of the camp system after the Bolshevik Revolution, early important camps and projects, the Great Terror and the systemization of the camps in the 1930’s. In the second section, she covers the camp experience - arrest, transport, life and work in the camps, the prisoners and guards. The third section again looks at big-picture history from World War II, when the Gulag reached its peak, to the decline after Stalin’s show more death and its persistence in various forms until the 1980’s. Applebaum frequently refers to Gulag memoirs and the quotes she chooses are illuminating and memorable. She also subtly questions the assumptions and interpretations of even the most famous writers. Her own interpretations are illuminating as well and she acknowledges the ambiguity and difficult choices faced by those caught in the Gulag while refusing to accept the rationalizations of the guards or those higher up in the system. At the same time, though, she makes some of the brutal and cruel choices of the guards or bureaucrats understandable. Applebaum questions the purpose of the camps, concluding that on any level they were a failure. Occasionally, she’ll insert herself and her present-day experiences into the book, but I thought it was done well and always to make a relevant point. I’ll have to agree with the quote on the front of the book, “It is fervently to be hoped that people will read Anne Applebaum’s excellent, tautly written, and very damning history.”

In the opening pages, I learned something I didn’t know – that Gulag is an acronym for the innocuous sounding Main Camp Administration. In the introduction, Applebaum gives an overview of the history of the Gulag and covers some points she will touch on throughout the book – the present forgetfulness or ignorance of the nature of the camps, some commonly-held incorrect ideas and comparisons with the Nazis and the Holocaust. The first section describes the beginnings of the camps in the makeshift prisons used during the Revolution. Also important was Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka or secret police. The Cheka would come to have various names over the years, all acronyms – OGPU, NKVD, MVD, KGB. Applebaum describes the isolated island camp of Solovetsky which was used to quarantine politicals who, with hunger strikes and outside communication, brought worldwide negative attention. In the 1920’s, the camps tended to be less regulated which could lead to instances of torture in some cases but others where bribery bought the prisoners comfortable living conditions. There was also much speculation about the purpose of the camps – was it to punish the prisoners or to reform them through work? Later on, the Moscow bosses would attempt to make the Gulag system profitable but Applebaum emphasizes that it never was. Naftaly Frenkel, a prisoner turned guard, made early attempts to streamline the camps but he only created the illusion of profit. The White Sea Canal, an early lauded project built with prisoner labor, was rarely used and other projects were shoddily constructed. The camps expanded into sparsely isolated areas and during the Great Terror, thousands were arrested and executed. Applebaum notes that the Gulag system wasn’t meant to be a death sentence like the German camps but during the Terror, it occasionally was. After the Terror, Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD, standardized camp regulations and prisoner rations in an attempt to maximize the work a prisoner could do but the supposedly adequate rules were rarely followed. Throughout the book it is seen that variations in camps, guards, camp bosses and work brigadiers would play an important role in the prisoners’ lives.

The second part of the book looks at the trip through the “meat grinder” from arrest and transport to life and work in the camps. Death and rebellion in the camps and the prisoners and guards are also examined. Applebaum liberally quotes from various memoirs and analyzes their reasons or justifications. This can be a hard section to read. I had to stop several times on the chapter on transport, arrival and selection. Applebaum gives a thorough description of the process a prisoner had to go through, with both the general procedure and personal experiences. She does frequently note that it can be hard to generalize as every camp was different and there were variations between, for example, camps near the Arctic and those near cities or differences between the camps in the 20’s and 40’s.

In the camps, even the most banal functions – sleeping, bathing, having socks – were a struggle. The Gulag was run with a mix of indifference, sloth, corruption and brutality. Escapes were feared and the camps, for the most part, were structured to prevent escapes but much of the day-to-day camp functions were lax. Regulations were rarely followed. However, Applebaum takes care to show that the Moscow bosses knew there were problems but rarely made efforts to correct them. There was hardly ever punishment for prisoner deaths in transport or in the camps or a failure to follow regulations. Even the most notorious camp chief, Ivan Nikishov, who lived in ridiculously luxurious conditions, was never reprimanded. Applebaum does not excuse the guards from responsibility either. Guards were not all bad – she notes that multiple memoirists, on describing the guards, would give a response similar to “it depends.” While perhaps they could not get out of the job or were forced by necessity to take it, they were responsible for their own behavior. Having read various books by Solzhenitsyn and aware of the more famous chroniclers of the Gulag, I found Applebaum’s section on the prisoners enlightening. A good portion of the Gulag prisoners were criminals and politicals did not make up the majority of the non-criminals – in the 1930’s, it was the kulaks (rich peasants, but really a term that could be applied to anyone). Still, some of the criminals were hardly criminals and many the politicals more ordinary people who made some minor mistake. There tended to be tensions between the politicals and criminals; often the criminals controlled various camp functions. Later, national groups would come to form the dominant groups (Poles, Balts).

Applebaum’s analysis in this section is quite good. With the guards, she parses what they could and couldn’t control, noting that their work was less restricted than their Nazi counterparts. “They could choose to behave brutally, or they could choose to be kind. They could choose to work the prisoners to death, or they could choose to keep as many alive as possible. They could choose to sympathize with the prisoners whose fate they night have once shared, and might share again, or they could choose to take advantage of their temporary stretch of luck, and lord it over their former and future comrades in suffering.” She does depict the guards’ conditions as harsh and notes the fluidity between prisoner and guard – guards and bosses could and often were arrested and those who got out could transition to guards or free workers.

The section on women and children in the Gulag is also unsurprisingly difficult to read, as rape, prostitution, and brutal conditions for giving birth and caring for children were the norm. Applebaum succinctly shows the other side of “a frequently told story – one which, it must be said, always sounds somewhat different when told from the woman’s point of view” – that of the woman who at first resists but then is forced to have sex/a relationship with other prisoners, guards or the camp chiefs. Applebaum quotes one woman, Tamara Ruzhnevits, who contrasts two such forcible relationships. With one, a man who beat her when she rejected him, Ruzhnevits found love, but she didn’t have any special emotions for the man who replaced him. In both cases though she was able to obtain privileges and became healthier. Applebaum notes that male memoirists would call it “a take of moral degradation. Alternatively, it could be called a story of survival.” Here, Applebaum shows that not all those types of relationships were the same and though they appear horrible outside of the Gulag, it is the typical of a system where adults cry over bread, cups and underwear, and doctors who make their patients sick and brigadiers who can fake work are the good ones. The treatment of children in the camps is pretty horrifying but many adult prisoners saw them only as vicious criminals. There is enough evidence to support both ideas – the children as victims or perpetrators of violence. Applebaum found few survivors who had grown up in the Gulag. “I even suggested to a Russian friend that we advertise in a newspaper, in an attempt to find a few such survivors to interview. ‘Don’t,’ she advised me. ‘We all know what such people became.’”

The chapter on survival strategies is very interesting. Applebaum lists and details four – pretending to work, collaborating, getting a pass from the doctors/into the hospital system and “ordinary virtues.” In this section, she of course relies heavily on Gulag memoirs. To start though Applebaum says that some doubt any of the Gulag memoirs and she adds her caveats – people who did shameful things wouldn’t write memoirs or would leave them out of their memoirs. In describing the “trusties” – those with various cushy camp jobs – two arguments are presented. Solzhenitsyn thought all trusties were, essentially, taking bread from Ivan Denisovich and collaborators. A different view is presented by Lev Razgon, who thought it was just another way to survive day-to-day. He also described the trusties as they did guards – there were good ones and bad ones. Applebaum notes that all the “classic” memoirists – Solzhenitsyn, Razgon, Varlam Shalamov and Evgeniya Ginzburg – all held trusty jobs at some point. For ordinary virtues, examples are given from memoirs and memories - forming relationships, attempting to maintain one’s dignity, even some altruistic actions. Shalamov claimed that there were no non-selfish actions but Applebaum catches him describing some later on. Prisoners memorized poems, wrote in their heads, sewed or carved or made objects or art. Occasionally, musicians, singers, dancers or actors would be spared as some camp bosses wanted their own orchestra or theatrical troupe. A surprising number of prisoners recalled their ability to tell stories as helping them – entertainment in the Gulag was scarce. Reminded me of Solzhenitsyn’s fiction – Cancer Ward, where one character recalls the Latin lessons he convinced a professor to give him in prison – “There was no self-interest in giving these lessons. It was just that for a brief time they made him feel like a human being.” or The First Circle – The Count of Monte Cristo is a precious possession, though that camp is one of the better ones.

The third section looks at the historical context from WWII to the end of the camps. With the start of the war, combat-age men with minor crimes were let out to fight but anyone considered dangerous was denied release and attempts to stop work were considered treason. The German invasion meant camps had to be evacuated. Evacuations were unsurprisingly difficult and brutal and the panicking NKVD also conducted mass executions. The makeup of the camps changed as the hold the criminals had on camp functions declined, national groups of Poles, Ukrainians and Balts formed tight, organized units and various camps for especially dangerous prisoners (sometimes this meant war criminals but as usual could be politicals) were formed. Applebaum only briefly touches on camps formed in the Eastern European satellites, further deportations during and after the war and Stalin’s efforts to break up ethnic/cultural populations by deporting whole groups of people but it is bad enough. The end of the war had raised hopes for amnesty – they were disappointed. Some well-organized rebellions had initial success but were put down. Just as it seemed as if more purges were on the way – of doctors, Jews, Leningraders and Georgians – Stalin died. Under Khrushchev, large-scale releases did happen and Applebaum looks again at personal experiences in the problems faced by the released prisoners. The Gulag still survived though in the era of dissidents such as Joseph Brodsky, arrests were no longer random and the size of the Gulag declined. This continued until Gorbachev granted a general amnesty in 1986. In the final chapters, Applebaum details the silence surrounding the history of the Gulag and the lack of automatic negative connotation associated with it, noting, for example that “Vladimir Putin…proudly identified himself as a ‘Chekist.’” and “Putin had made a point of visiting the KGB headquarters at Lubyanka, on the anniversary of the Cheka’s founding”. She tries to make an estimate for the number of people in the Gulag but says that can never truly take into account all those affected by it. This is an excellent, informative, insightful book which I would unhesitatingly recommend. show less