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Title: Gulag : A History by ANNE APPLEBAUM ISBN: 0-7679-0056-1 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 29 April, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.34 (32 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Towards a Mature History of the Gulag
Comment: This book is a excellent and surprisingly balanced history of the Soviet prison system. Applebaum readily admits that it is an incomplete first attempt at the full story, but she has gone beyond the horror show and has seriously considered why and how the Gulag system came to be.
"Gulag" offers no apologies for communist rule -- it begins by calling the prisons concentration camps and wonders why the Nazis are commonly seen as a greater historical evil than the Soviets -- but the damning tone of the introduction moderates when the details of the camps are discussed. When passing on the grislier stories from survivors' memoirs, Applebaum often notes that these were generally extreme situations and that many writers' concentration on the politicals does not represent the general prison population, the majority of which was composed of the common criminal element that would be imprisoned in every modern society. The camps themselves were not designed to torture and kill (although they did), but rather to be profitable (they never were). Camp death figures are usefully compared to contemporary death rates in the greater Soviet population, which by modern standards were astonishingly high. It is also made clear that reliable figures and non-anecdotal sources are still rare and much remains unknown about the administration of the camps. This constant historical context and intellectual honesty makes Gulag an excellent first history of the Soviet labor camps.
Gulag obviously, and appropriately, lacks the overwhelming literary flair of Solzhenitzyn's "Ivan Denisovich" and "Gulag Archipelago". Applebaum has the adequate writing style of a journalist, which doesn't covey the grandeur often found in the best historical writing. For the most part the tone is very matter-of-fact, filled with both anecdotes as well as statistics, with the exceptions being the damning first and final chapters.
Rating: 5
Summary: A shockingly decriptive reality...
Comment: GULAG is an acronym of the Russian words Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei. Literally, in English, it means Main Camp Administration but on a broader scale Gulag became known as the Soviet sytems of slave labor, referring to all of their camps, from concentration camps to punishment camps and even children's camps. Ms. Applebaum makes a very good point in her introduction, as she explains that "to many people, the crimes of Stalin do not inspire the same visceral reaction as the crimes of Hitler" despite the fact that during the years of Stalin's reign, millions more suffered than the numbers killed by the German concentration camps. Every once in a while, I find myself drawn to a nonfiction book and this one caught my attention and held it from beginning to end as I learned about the atrocities that affected nearly every Russian living during this time period. If they were not personally enslaved in one of the work camps, they knew someone who had been. People were arrested for the most minor crimes and offenses in order to fill the camps with working bodies to maintain the high level of production demanded by their superiors. Those imprisoned suffered from starvation and exhaustion to the point where many reports of self-mutilation were recorded in an effort to earn themselves a vacation in the camp hospital, where rest and higher rations of food were available. There is so much information in this book I can hardly imagine the amount of time involved in preparing it. I was very impressed not only with Ms. Applebaum's knowledge but also her ability to portray many different aspects of the camps, giving the reader an inside look at a system that should only exist on paper.
Rating: 4
Summary: well done
Comment: A very good book, deserving of all the acclaim it has gained.
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Title: Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman ISBN: 0393051447 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Stalin : The Court of the Red Tsar by SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE ISBN: 1400042305 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 13 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn ISBN: 0060007761 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 22 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Kolyma Tales (Combined Two-Volume Edition) by Varlam Shalamov, John Glad ISBN: 0140186956 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1995 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Black Earth: A Journey through Russia after the Fall by Andrew Meier ISBN: 0393051781 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 02 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $28.95 |
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