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title: "Gulag (Pulitzer Prize Winner): A History"
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# Gulag (Pulitzer Prize Winner): A History

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PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • This magisterial and acclaimed history offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost. “A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be.” — The New York Times A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century The Gulag—a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners—was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, Gulag is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century.

Review: This Terrific Book WIll Become The Standard Bearer! - 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 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 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!
Review: "The banality of evil" was never so obvious - This is not an easy book to read, and I’m sure it was much harder to write in such a way that the reader would read it. It is also not a mere listing of the number who died or concise descriptions of the tortures employed for whatever purpose, although those matters are discussed if you are so interested. It is an overview of the ‘staat in staat’ of the Gulag; once you ‘entered’ the organization, Soviet public law (such as it was) became irrelevant. You were no longer a Soviet citizen; you were a denizen of the Gulag. And under Stalin, your arrest was a purely arbitrary matter; you might have as easily been hit by lightning, and for the same ‘reason’. But before a reader gets to the exploration of the subject, the author makes the introduction interesting on its own; Ms. Applebaum examines the asymmetry of Western response to Hitler, a universally despised mass murderer, compared to Stalin, who, by direct order, starved more Ukrainians to death than the number of Jews Hitler managed to kill in his ‘industrialized’ murder machines. Even now, people in the EU and the US who would never hint of a defense of Hitler will dismiss Stalin’s crimes as trivial, and often claim his show trials as, well, maybe justified. Those need to read Judt in “Post War”, (certainly no ‘capitalist tool’), who, examining all of the evidence, has to admit that ‘central planning leads to centralized murder’. But there remain in the West those who still, in spite of all evidence continue to hope otherwise. Specifically, she mentions Heidegger, whose early flirtation with the Nazis ruined his reputation, while Sarte was given a pass for taking an ‘omelets and broken eggs’ position, as was Camus, not to mention that pathetic excuse for a journalist William Durante, who originated that despicable phrase. She excuses that asymmetry in a way which seems far too kind; simply assuming the Western left was forgivably stupid. We continue to live with that stupidity, and I do not see it as forgivable; “Useful idiots” seems more than appropriate here. Regardless, we are led through the Gulag from arrest to, sometimes, release. Yes, many were released, quite a few near death to die shortly after to avoid another death stat on the camp’s record. And then quite often those released were released at the camp entrance with no resources to return to their homes, nor ‘clean’ papers. Some few who were released were given official ‘forgiveness’ and, if they could find their way ‘home’, might return to a normal life. Suffice to say, the system is revealed as it was: Slave labor, under horrible conditions, and with scant chance of return to normality. Not surprisingly, it seems the cruelty was (largely) not directed from Moscow, but was simply a product of the same dystopian Soviet system which produced thousands of shoes, all of the same size; there was no incentive for the workers to do other than the least they could. Ms. Applebaum quotes Solzhenitsyn pointing out that the zeks went thirsty not by design, but because the guards would have to fetch the water and carry it back to the zeks; they’d rather take the time for a smoke. Indeed, the banality of evil. There is far more in the detailed examination of the cultures within the camps (and prisons) zeks, trustys, guards, administrators, and finally an accounting of the delayed release of the political prisoners; it is all worth reading as it clearly defines the Soviet leadership’s dismissal of the matter; the Gulag was part and parcel of the evil of communism. For those still trying to put lipstick on the commie pig, I’m sure you’ll find details to dispute. For the rest of us, it is far beyond worthy of reading.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #40,794 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #28 in Communism & Socialism (Books) #29 in Russian History (Books) #48 in European Politics Books |
| Customer Reviews | 4.6 out of 5 stars 1,988 Reviews |

## Images

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ This Terrific Book WIll Become The Standard Bearer!
*by B***K on June 4, 2003*

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 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 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!

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "The banality of evil" was never so obvious
*by R***L on August 12, 2018*

This is not an easy book to read, and I’m sure it was much harder to write in such a way that the reader would read it. It is also not a mere listing of the number who died or concise descriptions of the tortures employed for whatever purpose, although those matters are discussed if you are so interested. It is an overview of the ‘staat in staat’ of the Gulag; once you ‘entered’ the organization, Soviet public law (such as it was) became irrelevant. You were no longer a Soviet citizen; you were a denizen of the Gulag. And under Stalin, your arrest was a purely arbitrary matter; you might have as easily been hit by lightning, and for the same ‘reason’. But before a reader gets to the exploration of the subject, the author makes the introduction interesting on its own; Ms. Applebaum examines the asymmetry of Western response to Hitler, a universally despised mass murderer, compared to Stalin, who, by direct order, starved more Ukrainians to death than the number of Jews Hitler managed to kill in his ‘industrialized’ murder machines. Even now, people in the EU and the US who would never hint of a defense of Hitler will dismiss Stalin’s crimes as trivial, and often claim his show trials as, well, maybe justified. Those need to read Judt in “Post War”, (certainly no ‘capitalist tool’), who, examining all of the evidence, has to admit that ‘central planning leads to centralized murder’. But there remain in the West those who still, in spite of all evidence continue to hope otherwise. Specifically, she mentions Heidegger, whose early flirtation with the Nazis ruined his reputation, while Sarte was given a pass for taking an ‘omelets and broken eggs’ position, as was Camus, not to mention that pathetic excuse for a journalist William Durante, who originated that despicable phrase. She excuses that asymmetry in a way which seems far too kind; simply assuming the Western left was forgivably stupid. We continue to live with that stupidity, and I do not see it as forgivable; “Useful idiots” seems more than appropriate here. Regardless, we are led through the Gulag from arrest to, sometimes, release. Yes, many were released, quite a few near death to die shortly after to avoid another death stat on the camp’s record. And then quite often those released were released at the camp entrance with no resources to return to their homes, nor ‘clean’ papers. Some few who were released were given official ‘forgiveness’ and, if they could find their way ‘home’, might return to a normal life. Suffice to say, the system is revealed as it was: Slave labor, under horrible conditions, and with scant chance of return to normality. Not surprisingly, it seems the cruelty was (largely) not directed from Moscow, but was simply a product of the same dystopian Soviet system which produced thousands of shoes, all of the same size; there was no incentive for the workers to do other than the least they could. Ms. Applebaum quotes Solzhenitsyn pointing out that the zeks went thirsty not by design, but because the guards would have to fetch the water and carry it back to the zeks; they’d rather take the time for a smoke. Indeed, the banality of evil. There is far more in the detailed examination of the cultures within the camps (and prisons) zeks, trustys, guards, administrators, and finally an accounting of the delayed release of the political prisoners; it is all worth reading as it clearly defines the Soviet leadership’s dismissal of the matter; the Gulag was part and parcel of the evil of communism. For those still trying to put lipstick on the commie pig, I’m sure you’ll find details to dispute. For the rest of us, it is far beyond worthy of reading.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Comprehensive, Detailed, well Documented
*by H***N on February 8, 2015*

Gulag by Anne Applebaum is an essential work surveying the Soviet Gulag beginning in 1921. It is an excellent chronicle of the Gulag camps taking both a chronological survey, and a thematic perspective. The chronological chapters jumped too much in the time periods to have a sense of the author’s direction. However, Part two s very effective reflecting life in the camps from every aspect from being transported to the camps, groups of prisoners, guards, women, work, food, and simply daily living. There is liberal use of quotations that breathes life into the prison camps and the daily struggles for survival. She also goes into great detail how the camps evolved and changed over time covered. The government’s prison policies are well documented beginning with Lenin through Gorbachev. In the work Applebaum set a goal to include the prison camps and abuses under the Soviet Eastern European satellite countries. This chapter is lengthy and merely a collection of facts and figures and does not provide any of the qualitative struggles discussed in part 2. These chapters are included by the author to provide a comprehensive survey of the Soviet Gulag. With access to greater documentation Gulag is an excellent and more comprehensive work that updates Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago published in the West during the 1970s. I recommend reading A Day in the Life of Denis Ivanovich by Solzhenitsyn which gives a fictional account of one day in a prison labor camp published in the West in 1962-63. It is one book that has left a memorable impression on me. Due to the lack of information and contradictions in documents she notes the difficulties in assessing how many people entered the Gulag. In an appendix she provides a discussion of many people were impacted. Relying on other studies she that 6 t0 7 million people exiled and 28.7 forced laborers entered the Gulag. I found the introduction and epilogue mandatory reading. Kindle readers need to be aware that the book opens at chapter one and need to go back to the introduction. Her summary is outstanding and points out that the Gulag does receives very little attention in comparison to the NAZI Holocaust. In an epilogue she points out that Russia has not confronted its past atrocities, and is becoming a forgotten memory with the likelihood that history will repeat itself.

## Frequently Bought Together

- Gulag: A History
- Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine
- Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

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