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A fully documented history of the Soviet camp system, from its origins in the Russian Revolution to its collapse in the era of glasnost. Anne Applebaum first lays out the chronological history of the camps and the logic behind their creation, enlargement, and maintenance. Applebaum also examines how life was lived within this shadow country: how prisoners worked, how they ate, where they lived, how they died, how they survived. She examines their guards and their jailers, the horrors of transportation in empty cattle cars, the strange nature of Soviet arrests and trials, the impact of World War II, the relations between different national and religious groups, and the escapes, as well as the extraordinary rebellions that took place in the 1950s. She concludes by examining the disturbing question why the Gulag has remained relatively obscure, in the historical memory of both the former Soviet Union and the West.… (more)
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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 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..
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.
I find some of the other comments posted here a bit baffling - she doesn't ignore WWII or the Tsarist prison system, though obviously they are not covered fully, as that is not the purpose of this book.
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.
Miso
She, and Eddie Izzard, have wondered why Stalin/Soviet memorabilia isnt reviled the way Nazi symbols are. This book is full of horrendous detail of ideology gone mad.
5 stars but not an easy read...
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.
The problem is that Applebaum systematically blanks out the central Jewish role in Bolshevism from
The interested reader can paste back in what the author has cut out:
- The October 1917 Bolshevik coup was launched against the Provisional Government and destroyed the Constitutional Convention that was preparing the way for a Russian democracy. The many contemporary accounts wrote of the indiscriminate violence and the identity of the Bolsheviks, e.g. American ambassador David Francis, "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews and 90 percent of whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists and they are trying to start a worldwide social revolution" (see David R. Francis', "Russia from the American Embassy, April, 1916-November, 1918 [1921]").
- Dozens of first hand accounts delivered to the British government told the same story ( Google: “a collection of reports on bolshevism in Russia pdf “) as did the London Times correspondent Robert Wilton (see his book, “The Last Days of the Romanovs”). They were correct in that 83% of the 12 member Bolshevik Central Committee was Jewish as was 70% of the 115 member Bolshevik government (Central Committee, Council of People's Commissars, Central Executive Committee and Extraordinary Commission) with the top leadership being exclusively Jewish if you count Lenin: i.e. Vladimir Ulyanov, Lev Bronstein, Ovsei-Gershon Apfelbaum and Lev Rozenfeld (a.k.a. Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev).
- The Bolsheviks from the start declared that anti-Semitism was punishable by death while they showed extreme violence against any opponents, especially other socialists and communists. Lenin declared that the French revolutionary Terror had failed through lack of intensity and instructed his Jewish terrorists to not repeat the same mistake. He also raised Stalin to the Central Committee for his obvious intelligence and undoubted capacity for easy violence and deception (see Robert Service's excellent “Stalin, A Biography”).
- The organized Gulag that appeared in 1928 with the White Sea-Baltic canal project followed the same lines with unbelievable conditions far worse than slavery (slaves generally had value, were fed, clothed and didn't die within months) with an all Jewish management: Lazar Kogan (Head of Gulag and Chief of Construction 1930-32), Matvei Berman (Deputy Head of Gulag to 1931 and Head from 1932), Seymon Firin (Assistant to Deputy Head of the Gulag 1932 and Deputy Head from 1933), Yakov Rapoport (Deputy Chief of Construction from 1931), Naftaly Frenkel (Assistant Head of Canal Construction) and Genrik Yagoda (Deputy Head of OGPU (NKVD) secret police from 1924 and later Head until 1936). All of them received the Order of Lenin (apart from Firin) as Soviet Heroes.
- This same group of Jews went on to head the Gulag as it rapidly spread throughout Soviet Russia (“metastasized” is the word used by Solzhenitsyn) while at the same time Russia witnessed a new Jewish “revolutionary” bourgeoisie amply described by Slezkine in his book, “The Jewish Century” as they enjoyed elite educational academies, worshiped Pushkin and visited their country dachas (the inspiration behind George Orwell's book, "Animal Farm" ). None of this in “Gulag – A History”.
- Equally the book gives three paragraphs to the Ukrainian death-famine (Holodomor) of 1932-33 in which 6-7 million Ukrainians died (at least 30% of them children). By June 1933 it is estimated that 30.000 people were dying every day while Jewish Politiburo member Lazar Kaganovich meticulously organized the removal of all foodstuff from the country with his commissars killing wild animals, setting up watchtowers and sending out inspection teams with any hoarding punishable by death.
This reviewer has the feeling that if 7 million Jews had been starved to death by Ukrainians, Applebaum would have given events more that three paragraphs, not to say that that a whole industry would have been built around it.
Its reasonable to ask why the author wrote the book. The Western media and academia have been happy to ignore the subject for 50 years so why is the Gulag suddenly “rediscovered” with such fanfare?
Applebaum says that, “Until now, the social, cultural and political framework for knowledge of the Gulag has not been in place”.
An alternative explanation could be that in the present Age of Open Information (and despite the best efforts of the Western media), there has been a growing awareness of the identities of Jewish Bolshevik mass murderers such as Yagoda, Frenkel and Kaganovich - hence the need for a new “definitive” goodthinkers account that puts the story straight.
A particularly questionable part of this effort are the sly backhanded attacks on Solzhenitsyn throughout the text. Apparently his crime was to have told the told the truth about the central Jewish core of Bolshevism.
As the title suggests, this work deals with the history of the Soviet gulag system of penal camps and relocation centers from the 1920s to their discontinuance in the 1950s. Unlike Red Famine, this book contains numerous personal stories and observations by those that survived the camps. As a result, it was easier to read and far more captivating than Red Famine. I can recommend this work for anyone interested in the subject matter, or Soviet history in general.
First of all, the reaction I got from friends and coworkers
Well. People don't joke about Nazi concentration camps and everybody knows about them. The Gulag involved millions of people, millions died (though there weren't systematic mass murders), millions were forcibly removed from their homes and condemned to certain death in remote locations and yet many people know nothing about this. Even Russians don't want to talk about it.
To be fair, I personally knew very little about the Gulag. I learned that so-called political prisoners were lumped into prisons with actual criminals. I learned that the camps were tasked with jobs that were impossible to complete and also tasked with major projects that were no use to anyone, like hundreds of miles of roads and railroads that were never used. I learned that most of the political prisoners weren't really very political at all ( not like they were out protesting Stalin or something). And that those arrested weren't just one ethnicity, religion, or economic class - they really crossed all sections of the Soviet Union. I also learned that there were many, many people outside the Gulag who were exiled but aren't counted as technically part of the Gulag.
Basically, almost everything I read in this book was news to me and I'm very much looking forward to Applebaum's next book.
I have mixed feelings about the book itself and, all in all, it simply
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