The origins of the gulag, 1917-1939: Bolshevik beginnings; "The First Camp of the Gulag"; 1929 - the great turning point: the White Sea canal; the camps expand; the great terror and its aftermath. Life and work in the camps: arrest; prison; transport, arrival, selection; life in the camps; work in the camps; punishment and reward; the guards; the prisoners; women and children; the dying; strategies of survival; rebellion and escape. The rise and fall of the camp-industrial complex, 1940-1986: the war begins; "strangers"; amnesty - and afterwards; the zenith of the camp-industrial complex; the death of Stalin; the Zeks' revolution; thaw - and release; the era of the dissidents; the 1980 - smashing statues.
Anne Applebaum studied Russian at Yale and International Relations and East European politics at the London School of Economics and St Antony's College, Oxford. She has been a writer and editor at the Economist and deputy editor at the Spectator, writing about European and British politics, as well as Warsaw correspondent for the Boston Globe and The Independent. She is now a columnist and a member of the editorial board of the Washington Post.
Nearly 30 million prisoners passed through the Soviet Union's labor camps in their more than 60 years of operation. This remarkable volume, the first fully documented history of the gulag, describes how, largely under Stalin's watch, a regulated, centralized system of prison labor-unprecedented in scope-gradually arose out of the chaos of the Russian Revolution. Fueled by waves of capricious arrests, this prison labor came to underpin the Soviet economy. Applebaum, a former Warsaw correspondent for the Economist and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, draws on newly accessible Soviet archives as well as scores of camp memoirs and interviews with survivors to trace the gulag's origins and expansion. By the gulag's peak years in the early 1950s, there were camps in every part of the country, and slave labor was used not only for mining and heavy industries but for producing every kind of consumer product (chairs, lamps, toys, those ubiquitous fur hats) and some of the country's most important science and engineering (Sergei Korolev, the architect of the Soviet space program, began his work in a special prison laboratory). Applebaum details camp life, including strategies for survival; the experiences of women and children in the camps; sexual relationships and marriages between prisoners; and rebellions, strikes and escapes. There is almost too much dark irony to bear in this tragic, gripping account. Applebaum's lucid prose and painstaking consideration of the competing theories about aspects of camp life and policy are always compelling. She includes an appendix in which she discusses the various ways of calculating how many died in the camps, and throughout the book she thoughtfully reflects on why the gulag does not loom as large in the Western imagination as, for instance, the Holocaust. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.
More than a full-scale history of the Soviet Gulag, this work by the Spectator's deputy editor asks why it is so little remembered in both Russia and the West. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
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