Gulag : A History | ANNE APPLEBAUM | The more I know about Russia, the happier I am to be...

Gulag : A History | ANNE APPLEBAUM | An Unparalleled Look at Life and Death in Stalin's Death Camps!

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Gulag : A History

	Gulag : A History ANNE APPLEBAUM, 2004 - 736 pages average customer review:based on 73 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

This landmark book uncovers for the first time in detail one of the greatest horrors of the twentieth century: the vast system of Soviet camps that were responsible for the deaths of countless millions. "Gulag" is the only major history in any language to draw together the mass of memoirs and writings on the Soviet camps that have been published in Russia and the West. Using these, as well as her own original research in NKVD archives and interviews with survivors, Anne Applebaum has written a fully documented history of the camp system: from its origins under the tsars, to its colossal expansion under Stalin's reign of terror, its zenith in the late 1940s and eventual collapse in the era of glasnost. It is a gigantic feat of investigation, synthesis and moral reckoning.

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The more I know about Russia, the happier I am to be American (if only by heart)

It's a work of labor as much as debt and seer investigative powers. It covers every aspect of the Gulag system from its pre-history to its closing-down.

Russia's history is sad, unsentimental, and violent. One must thank God that Americans took a more noble and humane path for their history. If people get what they deserve, the Russians must be really wicked, and Americans must congratulate themselves.

Take these words from a Russian of today: "Perhaps the old system was bad -but at least we were powerful, we don't want to hear that it was bad." So will the devil himself say on the day of reckoning.

Bad people make bad systems. "The new Russian elite's arrogant contempt for its fellow citizens lives on" says the author. Seems like Russia -and the rest of the world- is in for some more trouble soon.

One might wrongly assume that once through the first half of the book, the second will be just more of the same, but read on, it can always get worse.

Despite the huge amount of information it collects, it still does not cover the story of the "special exiles", millions of people who were sent not to concentration camps but to live in remote villages were they died of cold, starvation or overwork.

Gorky's description of the prisoners of the forced labor camps, and the kulaks: "half-animals". He and the other "intellectuals" were the ones most exhilarated by the "progress" of Soviet society!

What still amazes me most is the extreme of voluntary blindness that many Russian communists reached to explain away their own arrests and torture: "We are honest Soviet people, hurrah for Stalin, we aren't guilty and our state will free us from the company of all these enemies. Their arrests were caused by "the cunning work of foreign intelligence services".

With this kind of people abounding in your country what can anyone expect. Thank God, again and again, for America.

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An Unparalleled Look at Life and Death in Stalin's Death Camps!

This is an extremely well researched and superbly written book!

Author Anne Applebaum does a stellar job in discussing all aspects of the Soviet Union's notorious GULAG (concentration camps). She utilizes Russian archival sources and personalizes them with the memoirs of camp survivors as well as dozens and dozens of interviews.

According to Applebaum, almost 30 million Soviet citizens were arrested between 1930 and 1953 and sentenced to suffer in the GULAGs. Almost 3 million were executed. Many more were beaten to death or died from starvation, overwork, exposure, suicide and sickness.

Large numbers of common Soviet citizens were arrested and sentenced simply because the regime needed their particular expertise or their labor to better exploit the natural and mineral resources of the Soviet Union's remote northern and far eastern regions. Indeed, it was slave labor, on a massive scale, that transformed the Soviet Union through the large-scale construction of roads, bridges, towns, cities, and industry in the country's most remote regions.

The end result is an unparalleled look at life and death in Stalin's death camps. The GULAG forever scarred the souls of the tens of millions of Soviet (and non-Soviet) men, women, and children that survived their sentences and continues to influence everyday life in Putin's Russia.

"The old Stalinist division between "enemies" lives on in the new Russian elite's arrogant contempt for its fellow citizens," concludes Applebaum. "Unless that elite soon comes to recognize the value and the importance of all of Russia's citizens, to honor both their civil and their human rights, Russia is ultimately fated to become today's northern Zaire, a land populated by impoverished peasants and billionaire politicians who keep their assets in Swiss bank vaults and their private jets on runways, engines running."

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The big and the small prison zone

Anne Applebaum's deeply moving human document brushes a raw picture of an, unfortunately, often recurring human tragedy: the use of slave labor in `work' camps, here in their soviet version.
The Gulag system reflected the whole political and social climate in the USSR. The State was a big prison zone and the camps the small ones.
The system was an integral part of the soviet regime. Its role was to speed up industrialization and to excavate natural resources in barely habitable places. There were camps near gold, coal and nickel mines, near chemical, metal-processing, fish canning and electricity plants, near public works (airports, highways, water ways, apartment blocks) and that all over the country.

History
The gulag system was founded after the October 1917 revolution and came under the control of the secret service in 1929. Another pivotal year was 1937, the beginning of the Great Terror, when Stalin imposed quotas for indiscriminate arrests and executions beginning with the CP hierarchy. There was a partial amnesty during WW II, but the inmates were sent in the front line. After Stalin's death, the system was dismantled, but the camps continued to be used for common criminals and as `reeducation' centers for dissidents.

Who were the inmates?
There was always a mixture of common and `political' criminals.
In the beginning, the political inmates were `counter-revolutionaries', members of the non-Bolshevik revolutionary socialist parties. Afterwards, they were mostly peasants (after the collectivization), national minorities, CP and even Gulag officials (during the Great Terror), prisoners of war (during and after the war) and dissidents.
A total of about 30 million people passed through the camps, of which about 10 % died.

Why?
Except the common criminals, people were arrested for what they were, not for what they had done. Their - avowed or not - crimes were imaginary and nonsensical.

The system
Every camp has to be profitable; of course, they weren't.
They were generally run by dump and corrupt bureaucrats, who had absolutely no respect for individual lives. The working practices were very bad.
After three weeks people were turned into wild animals, fighting a naked struggle for survival in an overcrowded world of stench, vermin, filth, promiscuity, prostitution, epidemics, hunger, revolting food, informants, self-mutilation, murders, suicides, punishment cells, tortures and deaths by exhaustion. The `normal' inmates were terrorized by common criminal bands.
After release, the psychological and social integration into the big prison zone was extremely difficult.

Russia as a country has still not digested its past: `Society is indifferent to the crimes of the past, because so many people participated in them.' `Former communists have a clear interest in concealing the past.'

Anne Applebaum illustrates all aspects of Gulag life and its dehumanization process with moving tragic individual fates.
This book is a must read for all those interested in the history of mankind. `The more we are able to understand the specific circumstances which led to mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature.'

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Encyclopedic in Scope; Doesn't Advocate Nazis=Communists; Needs Corrections

GULAG stands for GLAVNOE UPRAVLENIE LAGEREI. (p. XV). Instead of repeating other reviewers, let's clarify some issues. I am amused by the Communist apologist reviewers who insist that the Gulags held only common criminals. Other than being "enemies of the people", as defined by Communist ideology, what crimes did my mother, grandmother, and aunt commit?

Applebaum doesn't suggest that the Communists and Nazis were equally bad--quite the opposite. She softens the Gulags, relative to Nazi camps (pp. xxxiii-xxxix), by pointing to the fact that Gulag prisoners (e. g, the early-1940's Poles) could be rehabilitated, that the status of subject peoples changed over time, etc. In contrast, she asserts that Nazi policies towards Jews were universal, unchangeable, and guaranteeing their deaths. This is manifestly incorrect.

To begin with, although the Nazis were in power from 1933 to 1945, the systematic large-scale murders of Jews didn't begin until mid-1941. Second, Jews diverted from the gas chambers and into forced labor, while a minority, were hardly a "tiny number." They numbered in the few hundred thousands, of which a large fraction ended up surviving the war. Nor were the Jews spared or released an "unusual exception". Over 1,600 Jews were released by the Kastner-Eichmann deal, and tens of thousands of others were saved by getting diplomatic immunity. A million Jews could have been freed by the Nazis had the trucks-for-Jews deal not fallen through. Finally, entire classes of known Jews were in fact deliberately spared by the Nazis. These include the Schutzjuden (full-blooded German Jews relabeled Aryans), the Karaites, American and British POWs who were openly Jewish, and Finland's (Germany's ally) Jews.

Applebaum's statements about the changing status of incarcerated Poles (1941-1942) themselves need qualification. To begin with, unlike Stalin relative to the Poles, Hitler was never in a position in which his release of the Jews could have potentially staved off his impending defeat. Second, the Sikorski-Maisky Pact was actually insincere, and only a temporary expedient. While some incarcerated Poles got to leave the USSR, most Poles did not--something which Applebaum incorrectly attributes to the haste of Anders. (p. 453). There is no evidence that, even when the Red Army was on the ropes in late 1941, Stalin at any time intended to return Poland's eastern territories or respect Poland's sovereignty. Finally, as Applebaum herself notes (p. 300, 433, 465), no sooner had the Soviets re-entered Poland (1944) than they began sending Poles to the Gulags anew.

Most amazing of all, Applebaum asserts that: "Nevertheless, the Soviet camp system as a whole was not deliberately organized to mass-produce corpses--even if, at times, it did." (p. xxix). This would be news to the Nazis, who carefully studied the Gulag system in order to emulate it (see, for example, the Peczkis review of Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz). Other than the factors of time and efficiency, the Nazis didn't care if undesirables died from shooting or gassing, or from overwork and disease. If anything, Auschwitz Kommandant Hoess admired the "passive"-death forced-labor methods used by the Soviets to annihilate entire nationalities.

But why not kill ALL enemies immediately and completely? Applebaum comments: "Given the climate of the time, the cruelty of the war, and the presence, a few thousand kilometers to the west, of another planned genocide, some have wondered why Stalin did not simply murder the ethnic groups he so despised. My guess is that the destruction of cultures, but not of the peoples, suited his purposes better." (p. 430).

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A missed opportunity

This book has its pluses and minuses. Sadly, this means that because there are other histories out there I would probably recommend to those who are interested in the GULag system one of those books. The one interesting thing this book does is give both a general history of the GULag system and intermix it with personal accounts which bring the experiences to life. That being said, personally, my problem with the book is that the author is either a sloppy researcher or is twisting information to suit her own needs.

To begin with, the information in the book is interesting, no doubt about it. A history of the GULag system, how it developed, who was behind some of the major activities that involved forced labor, orders, camp commandants, etc. Then there's life in the camps, also small chapters on arrests, interrogations, transport to camps, etc. All have information mainly from memoirs and recollections that have been published in English and Russian either by themselves or as part of an anthology. All of this is good and gives the reader an interesting view of the GULag.

The problem comes from the fact that indeed, instead of taking an objective view of the GULag system the author has a need to compare it to the Nazi system. Making comparisons here and there which really do not help but in fact muddle the issue. She will time and again go out of her way in the narrative to show how these camps differed from Nazi concentration camps. Also interesting to note is the fact that what happened to the majority of people, throughout practically the entire process, was based less so on state policy than on various variables one would encounter along the way; simply put, do you confess to your crimes? Have others confessed to you doing what you're accused of? Is there enough evidence against you? During what year were you arrested? Which camp were you sent to? How were you sent (via railroad, car, etc)? Who was the camp commandant at that point? Who were the guards? Was there a large criminal element? Were there many political prisoners? Were you in a solitary cell or a holding cell with dozens of people? And so on and so forth, any and all had the power to make your experiences in the camps that much better or worse.

Now, my biggest problem with the book is the fact that before I started it I had read an anthology about women who were in the GULag camps. The anthology included various extracts from their memoirs. At two points in Applebaum's book I ran across first a question on behalf of one of these authors which should have been rather a statement and eventually found an incorrect paraphrasing which was used in the wrong context from the same anthology. To go over every endnote would take too much time so I am simply pointing out that something here isn't right. These changes are not simple and alter the entire meaning of what is being said which is why I feel a need to mention it. Since this book was fresh in my mind I easily recalled these instances and went back to check them finding out that indeed something was wrong when Applebaum transfered them to her own work. Another mistake made is when talking about General Vlasov she comments that his army was made up of Red Army deserts who supported Hitler. This is not true, these men were not deserters but rather POWs who choose to join Vlasov for a variety of reasons. Some did in fact hate Communism and the Soviet system while plenty of others simply wanted to be fed and survive for as long as possible. This is, again, simply word of caution.

In the end I think there are better works out there about the GULag, but this wouldn't be a horrible starting point.

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