Rating: 
Summary: Caveat emptor
Review: Problem with Anne Appelbaum is that she is a passionate Russophobe, and one has to look at her Gulag and read it not as a detached intellectual study but as an ideological exercise, because Anne Appelbaum's Gulag is certainly not a detached study and because the reader should be aware that ideology, fabrication and exaggeration, no matter how skillfully presented, never amount to research or to scholarship. Gulag is really not an anti-Communist piece but an inflammatorily anti-Russian and Russophobic book written by a journalist (not a historian) with strong anti-Russian ideological and even racial agenda on her own. In this capacity Anne Applebaum is a provocateur of the first grade. In defense of Anne Applebaum, if that can be used as her defense, I must say that she is not unique. The Russophobic genre in the United States (and to much lesser extent in Britain) is voluminous and prolific, and when American readers are buying books either on Napoleonic history or recent Communist movements they may be in for a Russophobic treat without knowing it. When I was taking a French language course about ten years ago a number of my classmates were Americans with little or no foreign language background. These were well-meaning, good people who genuinely wanted to learn French. However, many of the students had so little linguistic experience (besides the whole exercise was taking place in a non-French speaking country, with no francophone environment around to speak of), that had the instructor taught them Turkish instead of French, few of the students would have noticed the difference. Caveat emptor! The book might look well-researched and is impressively thick but in this particular instance you may well be taking Turkish classes while you signed up for a French course. As usual Anne Applebaum starts with the premise that Stalinism or Soviet Socialism were as bad or worse than Nazism. I must here add that her Russophobia is country specific and to a degree family-related and is very deeply, in fact I sense, racially felt. Since Poland is the ultimate starting premise for Anne Applebaum's Russophobic journey, then the reader should be aware that anti-Russian sentiments there are at least 500 years old and often have little to do with Communism but originate in the ancient rivalry of those two closely related nations. Any comparison of Nazi occupation of Poland would serve as a good illustration of why, no matter how awful Soviet occupation was, the Nazi regime was incomparably more evil. In four years of Nazi occupation Poland lost 6 million people. Although the crime of Katyn (secret murder of perhaps as many 24,000 Polish officers) was despicable as was the deportation of Poles from eastern Poland to Siberia, they do not compare with the murder of some 6 million Polish citizens, deliberate destruction of housing stock, industry and agriculture or even intentional demolition of architectural landmarks. Instead in 50 odd years of Soviet occupation, population of Poland increased dramatically, restrictions on foreign travel were often minimal and most of Nazi-wrought damage was reversed. These are two entirely different scales of evil. General Wladyslaw Anders remarked to General George Patton - "With the Nazis, we [the Poles] lose our lives; with the Soviets, we lose our souls." Loss of one's soul is deplorable but unlike the loss of life it is purely a metaphysical concept. Several of this reviewer's relatives were killed during the years of Stalinist terror. None of them was an ordinary or common person though and the regime had its own twisted reasons why it went after them. This reviewer's own grandfather spent almost 14 years in Stalin's Gulag and, in-between, 3 years in the Nazi captivity as a POW. This reviewer invested inordinate amounts of own time and money in researching the subject of Soviet political persecution and helping people find information about their relatives. This reviewer also petitioned President Putin, current president of the Russian Federation, to create a special commission on Soviet crimes and believes that only a proper official investigation, determining exact number of victims, acknowledging all Soviet crimes regardless of how long ago they took place, and setting up a compensation scheme for the few remaining survivors is the only proper way of handling this incredibly important issue. Russia's future depends on how it handles the Stalinist and Soviet past. This reviewer is a convinced anti-Communist who believes that the Stalinist crimes were absolutely abhorrent. In the same time it is obvious that placing Anne Appelbaum's ideologically-tainted, racist and repugnantly Russophobic creation in the same category as Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is not helpful and is in fact an insult to the memory of all the victims of Stalinism.
Rating: 
Summary: From the cover to the credits, this book is INCREDIBLE!!!!!
Review: I took one look at the cover of this book and the name, "Gulag" and was inspired to get a copy. All I can say is that if you have an interest in Russian history or the diabolical realities of Communism, then READ THIS BOOK!! An absolutely engaging, unbaised, fair and balanced look at the many factors that made the "Gulag" what it was. Well-researched and filled with juicy morsels, this book is a MUST READ!
Rating:
Summary: A comprehensive historical survey that keeps your focus.
Review: The author has written a finely detailed and never-dull survey of the Gulag. One understands upon reading this text the sheer scale of waste of resources, human potential, and the terrible psychological drain that the Gulag had on the U.S.S.R. Without delving into unneeded polemics or victor's dogma over the Cold War, Anne Applebaum nevertheless exposes with ruthless detail why the Gulag must have been one of the contributing factors in the decline of the Soviet Union. This large volume is managed very shrewdly by the author, with neatly segmented chapters covering many aspects of the Gulag. Chapter by chapter Applebaum covers the Gulag system from several angles: the people and their sufferings in the system, aspects of the system as a bureaucratic institution, historical evolutions in the Gulag, and the people and institutions who ran this sprawling enterprise. The beginnings, depths, and dismantling of the Gulag are other main themes in this book. We also learn how in many regards the sad legacy of the Gulag seems to have emanated from certain characteristics of the nature of incarceration in Russia, and that the system, sadly, has not completely disappeared. While a historical account, this book almost reads at time as a (sad) novel. There are fascinating insights into how people perservered and surived in what seems the most hopeless of existences. Within the over-arching evil of the system, evil existed in various degrees and some camps were worse than others. A revelation to this reader was the use of the criminal element within the Gulag as a tool to manage the non-criminal, political inmates. Equally, revealing was the ulimate contribution of the Gulag in fomenting the criminal element in the U.S.S.R. The system saw its insurrections and did not always oppress without sparking reaction from the inmate population. There is no shortage of interesting (though perhaps often disagreeable) characters in this book. People learn once again of the vastness of Russia, and how the country was such a crossroads for people of so many races and nations whose lives were unsettled so tragically in the Gulag. One learns, for example, how the Gulag created ethnic Eskimo bounty-hunters (for escapees), how nearly entire races of people were displaced by the system, how age old foes of Russia found so many of its citizens trapped in the Gulag. Especially sad was how inmates even entered the system from outside the U.S.S.R. as part of the deals made during the Second World War with the West's Stalinist ally. And of course the book covers the exporting of the Gulag to the Eastern-block countries occurs as an outgrowth of Soviet expansion following the Second World War. After reading this book, the reader sees how this monstrous system transcended borders and dealt crippling disruptions to the lives of millions who at least managed to survive (and death to the millions who perished in the system). And as always one sees the vastness of Russia itself as a vast island-like prison during the Gulag era. This book takes the reader from the Solevetsky Islands near Finland to the Sea of Japan. One learns of people whose lives as components of the Gulag system enter and exit the system from and to places as distant as Palestine and India. "Gulag" is a fasinating and thoroughly researched book that I highly recommend.
Rating:
Summary: Truly a monumental work.
Review: Congratulations to Ms. Applebaum on delving into a subject so terrible in nature and scope that even today, about a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, former Soviet leaders and appartchiks can't face the truth. In many cases they simply deny the existence of the horrors created by the Soviet system. They deny the horrors for which they themselves were responsible! Here in the west, we also have people and institutions that deny the crimes of the Soviet Union (the late columnist Walter Duranty and the New York Times respectively). Indeed, it makes one think that if only the world community brought more pressure on the Soviets then MILLIONS of innocent lives could have been saved. The book also puts into perspective all situations where despotism rears its ugly head and the need for those that are free to intervene on behalf of the innocent anywhere around the world. This book is an absolute must read!
Rating:
Summary: Russia's Big Secret
Review: The Russian gulags make the German Holocaust look almost like a tea party. Russians from all walks of life were arrested at random on bogus charges to be cattled into the gulag system which in turn provided millions of men, women and children for slave labor. The Russian economy took into account how many prisoners there were available. If there was a shortage, more were merely arrested. There were more "reasons" for arresting someone than for not arresting them. This provided the logic behind the whole system. For example, a group of brothers were arrested for winning a soccer match because they defeated the favorite team of the NKVD (a.k.a. KGB) leader. Prisoners were tortured (for false confessions), beaten, starved, frozen, raped, mutilated, traded, and deprived of humanity. Being killed or dying was the least of one's problems. This truly is one of Russia's biggest historical secrets.
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Summary: The NEW STANDARD
Review: Thsi work details all aspects of camp life. It speaks of the many projects understaken, like the White Sea Canal. it speaks of the many peoples that were deported into the camps. It shows how they exists for all manners of prisoners and how diverse the structure. The author examines the guards and the resistance. She examines the foriegners(Americans, Spanish was veterans, poles, spies, germans and many others) who came to live in the cmaps and their relations with the russians. This is an amazing book, but has a lack of maps and statistical data.
Rating: 
Summary: Towards a Mature History of the Gulag
Review: 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:
Summary: A Very Good Book
Review: This is a very good book that's right up there with Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago." It's not exciting to read (very few histories are), but the information contained in it is vital to our understanding of the Soviet Union's past, and Russia's present and future. This is vital to ensure that in the future, this type of thing doesn't happen again.
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Summary: Stunningly Beautiful Book!
Review: Sad but amazingly in-depth and full of true stories. Ranks right up there with Solzhenitzyn's "Gulag Archipelago". A well-researched and timely work!
Rating:
Summary: fantastic work!
Review: Ms. Applebaum has done an exemplary job of writing a much-needed history of the Gulag. Her prodigious research is expressed in a concise, clear writing style. In the early 1970s, I read Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago." At the time I was taking modern Russian history courses at U.C. Berkeley, but have not thought about the Gulag much since then. Ms. Applebaum's book fills in some very important gaps for the mainstream western reader. It should be required reading not only for Russian history courses, but for anyone who wants to be fully informed in the history of the modern world.
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