Gulag A History
Anne Applebaum
Anchor Books, 677 pages
This magnificent history of the Soviet Gulag is both absorbing and appalling – absorbing for the depth of Applebaum’s research and appalling for the depths of human depravity it describes. She was fortunate in having access to archives opened after the collapse of the Soviet Union; Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose trilogy The Gulag Archipelago was published in the early 1970s, did not have that privilege.
The Gulag (an acronym for the Russian words for Main Camp Administration), was the major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union, a sprawling network of literally thousands of camps stretching from near Kyiv in the west to Magadan in the East, from the northern extremity of Siberia to Vladivostok in the south. There had never been another institution like that and hopefully never will be – but don’t hold your breath.
The pre-revolutionary imperial government already operated a system for removing political opponents from society, although almost always temporarily, and initially it was by no means as extensive or intentionally cruel as it would later become. Russians exiled by the tsarist secret police enjoyed many privileges and rights which Soviet prisoners could not even dream about: visitors, newspapers, making music, freely writing and receiving letters on political subjects from friends and relatives. Stalin himself was exiled to Siberia a few times, but security was so lax that he frequently escaped.
Lenin and, in particular, Stalin merely annexed the system, extending the number of camps and the cruel regime prisoners had to endure.
The Gulag had a twofold motive: purging society of elements they regarded as undesirable, i.e. common criminals as well as much larger numbers of people regarded (rightly or wrongly) as political enemies, and, equally important and unlike the tsarist system, using their labour to expand the Soviet economy.
The Gulag should not in other ways be compared to the Nazi camps, the primary purpose of which was genocide. Slave labor, while widely used, was less important than exterminating Jews, gypsies and homosexuals.
The camps were intended to make a profit, and Stalin himself regarded them as a major pillar of the Soviet economy and later the war effort. This was just as inefficient in Soviet Russia as in Nazi Germany.
The first camp, in the old Solovetsky monastery in the White Sea, was initially quite tolerable, but conditions soon took a sinister turn. Applebaum systematically surveys every aspect of this monstrous system: how and why people were arrested (being a staunch supporter of Stalin was of no help at all), its expansion, transport to the camps, the labor system, camp hierarchies, food, punishment, the guards and the often unspeakable violence visited on the prisoners.
Although bureaucracy soon realized that the camps were economically inefficient, nobody dared tell Stalin, but his death did not bring about abolishment of the Gulag – it kind of petered out and, surprisingly enough, existed into the 1980s.
How many died? There is no accurate answer. Applebaum “reluctantly” gives a figure of 2,749,163, although it is probably an underestimation. These deaths, of course, do not even begin to encompass the grief, pain or the sadistic disruption of lives.
Aside from its historical overview, the book includes numerous personal stories, some of which I found extremely distressing to read, particularly those dealing with women and children. Here is just one of many examples: “Little Eleanora, who was now fifteen months old, soon realized that her pleas for ‘home’ were in vain. She stopped reaching out for me when I visited her; she would turn away in silence. On the last day of her life, when I picked her up… she stared wide-eyed somewhere off into the distance, then started to beat her weak little fists on my face, clawing my breast, and biting it. Then she pointed down at her bed.
In the evening, when I came back with my bundle of firewood, her cot was empty. I found her lying naked in the morgue among the corpses of the adult prisoners. She had spent one year and four months in this world…”
