Gulag: A History
by Anne Applebaum
Doubleday. 679 pp. $35.00
Returning from a trip to the Soviet Union in 1934, P. L. Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins, wrote caustically that she had been “diddled”: “the tourist is shown only the best of everything.” Unlike Travers, most writers and intellectuals who visited the Soviet Union at the time were quite easily taken in. Among them was the Nobel Prize-winning French writer Romain Rolland, who brushed off reports of brutality in Soviet concentration camps with the comment that “There are almost identical things going on in the prisons of Poland; you have them in the prisons of California . . . ; you have them in the English dungeons of the Andaman Islands.” Even today, although no one denies the existence, or the horrors, of the Gulag—the vast system of Soviet prison camps—some scholars still downplay the central role it played in Soviet history.
Anne Applebaum, a columnist for the Washington Post and a frequent commentator on events in the former Soviet Union, has little tolerance for this point of view: for her, the Gulag was the defining feature of the Soviet system. From its beginnings as a means of incarcerating opponents of the Bolshevik regime, it soon grew into a vast network of slave labor whose ulterior rationale was to develop the remoter parts of the Russian semi-continent. Indeed, Applebaum sees the Gulag as the linchpin of the Soviet economy during Stalin’s successive Five Year Plans, when slave laborers were found at worksites in every part of the USSR.
By the early 1950’s, the Gulag was consuming more than 16 percent of the state’s entire budget and 10 percent of total capital investment. Slave prisoners mined coal, gold, nickel, and, eventually, uranium. They processed oil and gas. They made everything from toys to airplanes. They built roads and canals. They erected entire cities, like Magadan and Norilsk, on the tundra. Most commonly in this heavily forested country, they cut trees and processed lumber for industry, laboring twelve-hour days in mosquito-infested swamps or at temperatures of 40 below.
More often than not, the prisoners worked with nothing more than crude hand tools. They lacked adequate clothing, food, or health care. They died by the thousands. Yet, around the world, supporters of the Soviet regime and, later, its third-world imitators trumpeted the economy based on this forced labor as a revolutionary advance over capitalism and a marvel of productivity.
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In reality, Applebaum shows, the Gulag was the quintessential expression of a one-party police state and the arbitrary, often sadistic, rule of its leaders. It was Lenin who created the secret police, introduced terror as a routine political tool, ordered the mass arrest of actual and potential opponents, and endorsed the notion of people as cogs in the machinery of the Communist state. It was Stalin who, far from being remote from the process as claimed by apologists then and later, bore direct responsibility for maintaining and expanding the use of prisoners as slave laborers. Applebaum adduces a number of factors to explain why the Soviet dictator took such a “deep personal interest in the camps”: his yearning for prestige, to be achieved through the rapid economic transformation of the country; his admiration of Czar Peter the Great, many of whose grand accomplishments depended on the expansion of serfdom; his megalomaniacal enjoyment of the spectacle of multitudes of people doing his bidding; the cruel pleasure he took in watching his enemies suffer.
As her treatment of Stalin suggests, Applebaum hardly shies away from the most difficult and contentious issues concerning the Gulag. Another such issue is the number of victims who disappeared into the vast Gulag “archipelago” (to use the term coined by the great Russian writer, and former inmate, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn). Over the decades, estimates of those arrested ranged from a low in the mere thousands—as proposed by some pro-Soviet researchers—to the millions asserted by so-called “cold warriors.” Making use of the still not fully accessible police archives, Applebaum sorts through the different categories of prisoners, resolves internal contradictions, acknowledges gaps, and offers her own “fair guesses.” These come closer to the higher estimates arrived at by Solzhenitsyn and by “cold-war” historians like Robert Conquest.
Applebaum puts the total number of forced laborers in the USSR before 1953 (the year of Stalin’s death) at 28.7 million. Excluded from the total are roughly 800,000 people who were executed shortly after arrest and the many thousands of others who were imprisoned or exiled or murdered outside the Gulag’s direct jurisdiction. No statistics, she notes, can take into account the untold numbers of the elderly or the very young who died prematurely because of the disappearance of their children or parents; the lifelong sufferings of those ostracized because of the arrest of a relative; the tragic break-up of families; or the myriad other social and psychological costs imposed by Soviet state terror.
Still another vexed subject is the relation of the Soviet slave-labor system to the Nazi concentration camps. As Applebaum points out, there were many critical differences between them. Although the practical result (and often the goal) of Stalin’s assault on certain ethnic groups—Chechens, Jews, Ukrainians, and others—was to undermine their autonomy and cultures, the purpose was not genocidal murder. Certainly no single minority was scheduled for annihilation as were the Jews in the Third Reich. In contrast to Germany, moreover, where the targets of repression were clearly identified, the enemy in Russia was much less precisely defined: people who were members of the ruling elite on one day could find themselves prisoners on the next. Applebaum documents many instances of jailers (and their higher-ups) ending up as inmates—and vice-versa.
Although fatalities were common in the Gulag, there were no camps like Auschwitz whose primary purpose was human slaughter. Mass executions did take place, but there were also random releases of prisoners. And while many camp commandants readily neglected or tormented their prisoners, a few strove to improve conditions.
But Applebaum does not make the mistake of overemphasizing these differences, in the manner of historians sympathetic to the Soviet cause who have refused to acknowledge similarities between Communist and Nazi dictatorships. Although she neglects to point out that the Gulag impressed, and to some degree inspired, Heinrich Himmler, she does observe that, “at a very deep level,” Nazi and Soviet concentration camps were “related.” Both were manifestations of the desire to persecute, dehumanize, and liquidate entire categories of people defined as enemies of the state. In both Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany, “people were arrested not for what they had done, but for who they were.” And the essence of both regimes, an essence reflected in their concentration camps, was a barbaric inhumanity that brought unimaginable suffering to millions of individuals.
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The heart of Gulag is a moving chronicle of the collective experiences of these millions of individuals—male and female, adult and child, Russian and non-Russian. Applebaum follows them as they underwent arrest, interrogation, and transport to the camps, and continues her harrowing narrative with chapters on work, life, and death after arrival. At some levels this part of the story is familiar from memoirs that have been available for years, but Applebaum adds new material from a host of archives and numerous interviews with former inmates, their family members, and former guards.
In so doing, she is able to provide the most thorough and subtle treatment of the subject to date. She also breaks new ground with information on the inmate uprisings that rocked the postwar Gulag, on the demise of the slave economy under Khrushchev, and on the political prisons of the final decades of the Soviet Union—which, although a far cry from those of earlier years, retained enough similar features to crush a new generation of dissidents. For these reasons alone, her book is not likely to be surpassed any time soon.
In a final chapter, on memory, Applebaum criticizes today’s Russians for their unwillingness to confront or even take an interest in the Gulag. “The past,” she writes, “does not haunt Russia’s secret police, Russia’s judges, Russia’s politicians, or Russia’s business elite.” But how, she rightly asks, will the rule of law and a decent civil society develop if there is no awareness of the pitfalls of excessive state power and no concern for the victims of the Soviet past?
Just as appropriately, Applebaum pleads that the rest of the world pay greater attention to the history of the Gulag. This barbaric apparatus was, as she shows, the model adopted by Communist dictators everywhere and still functioning in today’s China and North Korea; she might have added that it provided a blueprint for the secret-police states of both Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Hafez al-Assad in Syria. No one can comprehend 20th-century history or truly appreciate the imperiled condition of a good portion of humanity in our own time without an understanding of the Gulag. Establishing that point is perhaps the major contribution of Anne Applebaum’s book.
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