Gulag (Pulitzer Prize Winner): A History

Applebaum's work is a broad overview of the Gulag system and the politics that drove it. Considering the immensity, the author has done well in style, technique and substance to pull back the veil on a system of human aberrance so huge that it has no peers in recent history. But it is difficult to review this book fairly due to it's content. For those knowing names and having photos of individuals lost to this maw of human depravity there can be no enjoyment here. For them, this is a terrible, terrible book confirming the worst whispers and imaginings of what `being sent to Siberia' was really like. A ghastly book exposing the worst kinds of assault on human dignity even beyond the mass slaughters of the Katina woods or Hitler's ovens. It's victims were tortured, starved, dehumanized in the most perverse ways imaginable to not only eliminate them as hurdles to central planning but intentionally squeeze from them their last drops of blood. Many luckily died much before, but that does not change intent. The only redeeming value in Applebaum's book is the exposure to drive assurance that such inhumanity never plagues our species again. But of course, it is ongoing in other hell holes at this very time. Such being the secret inner working of totalitarians who by necessity must find venues of disposal of it's human waste. Waste being opponents, whether individuals, tribes, or whole countries that do not fit utopia's mold. Or, as Applebaum reveals, merely foils to divert attention from the systemic and abject conditions visited on the working class by it's overlord central planners. I read this book not for entertainment but to better understand what happened to those left in Eastern Europe after the Nazism took it's first cut. One person looking back to discover the desecration of his family tree and his ethnic inheritance. But imagine the disappointment to discover that "Gulags" were too good for any other than Russia's own 30 million. Eastern Europeans, as it turns out, were cast into even lower levels of hells reserved especially for them in elsewhere's unknown. It is absolutely mind boggling to multiply my familial losses, illness to the escapees and even after-affects to progeny, by 30 million. But apparently those numbers do not suffice. For even now the public record is incomplete as to other administrative compartments, categories and hells that might have been, or are still ongoing, to serve as gear-works for the machines of totalitarianism. It is a commendable book that serves it's topic well. If you are compelled to read and discover, do so. But I cannot imagine anyone having any morsel of compassion or empathy for the human soul enjoying the reading of these words.

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!

Muy bueno, no decepciona nada de nada, si quieres documentarte sobre las promesas y felicidad que vende el comunismo pero la dura realidad que esconde. Debería leerlo todos los pelagatos de letras de la UCM que se dejan embaucar por una "ideología" política responsable de tantos millones de muertos y aniquilación como Hitler. Pero es que los nazis perdieron la guerra y los comunistas no, y se han preocupado de que nadie cuente las verdades de sus atrocidades y millones de muertos fruto del amor a su pueblo de Lenin o Stalin. Esa idología igual que una secta que promete el paraíso y te trae la degradación y aniquilación. Debería ser lectura obligatoria de preuniversidad. ¿Para cuándo un Erasmus en Venezuela o Cuba que espabile a los borregos que capta el comunismo en España? Vamos al WC con tanto ignorante suelto.

Incredible work

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Interessante ed istruttivo. Prima e terza parte ottime.Seconda parte un po' meno buona. Globalmente una bella lettura

Applebaum’s Gulag is an incredible piece of work. She does an amazing job of bringing attention to a tragic and often overlooked part of history. The book is deeply researched but still very readable, and it really makes you think about how much of this past has been ignored or forgotten over the years. It’s powerful, sobering, and absolutely worth reading.