Rating: 
Summary: Good, not great
Review: Well, hmm, where to start. I hesitate to comment on comments, but several here were over the top. Of course 'The Gulag Archipelago' was not a work of fiction, anyone with even a cursory reading of a couple of chapters of the four volume work would figure that out. I in fact read this book from cover to cover, which I would suggest would be a good prerequisite for writing either a glowing approval, or a condemnation. To claim Ms. Applebaum to be a right wing shill is a bit ridiculous. She is a member of the editorial board and a regular columnist of the rightist mouthpiece, the Washington Post. In fact, if I have any problem with the book, it is a tendency to be overly conservative in the estimates in the appendix, and also perhaps a certain tendency to apply modern, American liberal values to the communists. (If only those darn Bolsheviks had been more concerned with homosexual rights and cultural diversity!). In truth, it is because of her credentials as a somewhat left leaning journalist that this book has merit. Robert Service, the Soviet scholar and Lenin biographer wrote that the book contains little that has not been already brought out in the Russian press. The book relies heavily on memoirs, although not exclusively. It is a good compilation of all the new information that has been brought out, and it brings home the point to yet another generation of the errors (yes, a value judgement) of communism. The point being, ideas do have consequences, not all value systems are equal, and oh my goodness, maybe there is such a thing as good and evil after all. Nazism and Communism are merely flip sides of the same coin. Both movements spring from the same intellectual wellspring, although taking a different path to the same end. I do appreciate the author's hard work, and her bringing a certain humanity to the topic. Oh, and by the way, I now read the author's columns every Wednesday in the Post. While I do not always agree with her, I have found a new respect for her efforts. Maybe she will make the leap to that 'vast right wing conspiracy' one day. ;)
Rating: 
Summary: Gulag: A History
Review: In a recent book review, Applebaum includes Salvator Allende in
a list of "murderous communist leaders" next to Stalin and Pol Pot. In "Gulag: A History" she choses Joe McCarthy as an example of a man with a correct view of Stalin. In an older article on Vorkuta, a town in Siberia founded essentially by Gulag prisoners during Stalin, she makes no secret of her antipathy for the "wretches" who insist of living there (the town they were born and raised in) although the state encourages and subsidizes their move to places in the south of Russia. These are just a few examples that show where Applebaum stands in relation to Communism and related issues. Her position is legitimate but they also show a strong emotional involvement in the subject and that is highly relevant if one is to trust her book "Gulag: A History". Since it deals with such a sensitive issue that relies on sources the reader almost certainly has no access to, this trust is crucial. When I first heard of the book, my concern was not that the data were distorted or fictitious but rather that their presentation as a coherent whole and interpretation was compromised by too strongly held beliefs. Unfortunately, the reading of the book confirmed this concern since a detached and nuanced approach needed for such a topic was lacking. And this brings me to the fundamental problem of the book, which is its point. Haven't we known of the murderous nature of the Communist regimes and the Gulag in particular, since the 40's? What meaningful knowledge do we gain by the enumeration of some more gruesome crimes in the Gulag? Does the book offer a new insight on the anatomy of these crimes (as was the case with Goldhagen's book on the extent of the complicity of the German public in the Nazi crimes)? I didn't see anything like that in this book. The only thing that comes close to that is the implicit message that "Communism was just as bad as Nazism". This message is dangerous: after 60 years, it should have finally become clear that Holocaust was simply the biggest crime in History. And this not only because of the number of people killed but above all because of the nature of the crime. Therefore, no matter how many more people are proved to have died under the communists, the crimes of Communism cannot be compared to those of Nazism.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful book
Review: A wonderful bookful. The ideas and thoughts are presently wonderfully, I would read this several times over.
Rating: 
Summary: Wretched truth of economic and political evil
Review: Applebaum chronicles with fine detail and compassion, the profoundly sad, cruel, arrogant and evil system that represented the political and economic basis for much of the Soviet Union's life, a life built on forced labor and false accusations. She starts with the origins of the camps, provides a thorough picture of elements of the camps - transportation to the camps, conditions, women and children, reward and punishment, the guards, work and survival strategies in the camps, revolts and amnesties, and more - and then concludes with the demise of the camps. From 179,000 prisoners in 1930, and peaking at 2,356,685 in 1949, the entire, miserable story makes the reader both want to put the book down out of revulsion yet also read on to the bitter end. From this morass of inhumanity arises a picture of Stalin's brutal belief in forging a 'perfect' country by enslaving people to do his will, and to do it poorly at best. The labor camps were an awful and misguided effort to develop the country's resources at a time when natural resources - timber, gold, uranium - were seen as the primary source of wealth. Sadly enough, Applebaum shows that Stalin had the world fooled. He even led us to believe that harsh terms and conditions were necessary and not unlike the efforts made to develop the American economy. Even vice president Henry Wallace, deluded by a Potemkin-village experience to the camps, said: "There is nothing irreconcilable in our aims and purposes." For those who want to see just how much the American and Russian systems differ, read this book. This is not simply a book about prisons. It is about a culture and a system, economics and politics, philosophy and practical decisions. The wretched truth is that the attempt to use slave labor to build an economy is not only immoral, it is impractical. The saddest fact is that it took sixty years to realize that the gulag system did not work, just like the rest of the country did not work. The gulag became a microcosm for the country and, when offered 'freedom', some of the camp prisoners reasoned that they were no worse off in the gulag than in trying to eke out a life in the Russian economy. Readers must realize the difficulty Applebaum had to assemble this portrait, learning Russian and accessing the archives and distant camps. This is a life's work, indicative of the millions of people who suffered at the hands of the gulag system.
Rating:
Summary: A Monumental Work
Review: In 1973, when Alexander Solzhenitsyn launched the first volume of his monumental GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, an oral history of Soviet concentration camps, he expressed concern that a proper history of the camps might never be written, that those who do not wish to recall would destroy all the documents "down to the very last one." As it happened, however, the documents were not destroyed; they remained locked away in files and archives. Nor did Solzhenitsyn foresee the coming of Mikhail Gorbachev and the advent of glasnost, his policy of openness, much less the unfettered availability of Gulag information and the flood of memoirs by camp survivors. It was an American Sovietologist-turned-journalist, Anne Applebaum, now a Washington Post columnist, who embraced the unexpected opportunity to undertake this vast and daunting project from which whole universities of ordinary researchers might have slunk away in dismay. Lenin himself, the founding father of Russian communism, established the first 84 camps of the Soviet Gulag almost immediately after the Russian Revolution, basing their design on tsarist precedents. Lenin's successor, Josef Stalin, presided over the Gulag's development into the far-reaching "archipelago" of which Solzhenitsyn wrote. Transport to the camps was no less nightmarish in many cases than the camps themselves. Prisoners en route to distant camps are said to have frozen to death even before they were loaded into the cattle cars, where they would sometimes remain crowded together for more than a month. Memoirs tell of trains being stopped to take off corpses, which were thrown into ditches. The struggle for survival was part of daily life in the camps, the struggle for bits of food, edible but often revolting, and for enough water to sustain life. In many camps, hardened criminals were part of the general population of politicals and other "enemies" who had committed no crime other than happening to have been born into the family of a relatively successful farmer. The criminals stole, murdered and raped as they pleased, often with the passive approval of the guards. The Gulag's growth continued throughout World War II and into the early 1950s, by which time there were 476 distinct camp complexes comprising thousands of individual camps. The number of prisoners in each camp ranged from hundreds to thousands. From 1929, when the Gulag began its major expansion, until 1953, when Stalin died, some 18 million people passed through the camp system. More than three million of them perished. Comparatively few of the Gulag prisoners (zeks) had been criminals in the conventional sense of the word. Some of them were arrested because a neighbor had heard them pass along an unfortunate joke or laugh at one, some because they had been seen engaging in "suspicious" behavior, and others were reported for having been ten minutes late for work or owning four cows in a village where other families owned only one. Some were members of a population category --- Poles, Balts, Chechens, Tartars, etc. --- that had suddenly fallen into disfavor. Immigrants were always suspect, as were ordinary Soviet citizens with foreign connections --- stamp collectors, Esperanto enthusiasts, anyone having relatives abroad, or a returned POW. In short, the smallest statistical possibility of guilt was sufficient cause for arrest and conviction. In 1937, the secret police launched an all-out campaign to extirpate a Polish spy ring allegedly operating in the Soviet Union. The secret police arrest order, which included virtually everyone of Polish background living on Soviet soil, specified that investigation was to begin at the time of arrest, not before, as a means of expediting the process. This transposition of procedural steps, Applebaum explains, meant the arrestees themselves would be forced to provide the evidence upon which the case against them would be built. More bluntly, she says, they were to be beaten or otherwise tortured until they "confessed" the role they had played in the apparently fictitious spy ring. Their testimony naturally implicated others, who were also arrested and similarly forced to confess whatever acts of espionage they could imagine having committed. One of the larger questions with which Applebaum grapples is whether the Gulag system developed haphazardly, through simple accretion in response to a need for additional space for prisoners, or as part of an elaborate plan. Was it intended primarily as storage space for undesirable elements in Soviet society, or as an apparatus for collecting slave laborers and putting them to work on projects, such as the White Sea Canal and the opening of the Siberian north? Scholars disagree, and evidence seems to support both sides. On the one hand, Peter the Great, whom Stalin obsessively admired, used serfs and prison labor to accomplish enormous construction projects at relatively little expense. Planned or not, the Gulag became immensely important as a source of virtually free labor. A Soviet historian has identified a correlation between the successful economic activity of the camps and the number of prisoners sent to them. His book also points out that sentences for petty crime became much harsher at a time when more prison laborers were urgently needed. Another example: In March 1934 the head of the secret police, G.G. Yagoda, wrote to subordinates in Ukraine ordering them to produce 15,000-20,000 prisoners, all fit to work, to help complete work on the Moscow-Volga Canal. As pure history, GULAG is a major achievement. It also fulfills the moral imperative to expose, document, and record in service to the collective memory the fate of so many millions of human beings torn from their families who suffered and died in hostile places far from their homes. Fittingly, Applebaum's book is dedicated to her predecessors who described what had happened and thereby made possible this monumental work. --- Reviewed by Hal Cordry
Rating:
Summary: A Forgotten Past, Not Remembered
Review: As a Latvian, this topic has been an interest of mine since childhood. I grew up hearing about the mass deportations of June 1941. One of the memoirs cited, John Noble's, "I Was a Slave in Russia", 1960, I read at least 40 years ago. I used to have a copy of this book. Why is this book so important? Because while dignitaries and heads of state visit Auschwitz, no one is visiting Vorkuta, Norlisk, Kolyma and other camps. Putin probably did not tell his esteemed visitors that St. Petersburg was built with bones and rests on bones. Russia has forgotten the past. Russia is ignoring the past. Russia wants the past to go away. Why else is there no official mourning or remembrances? No one mourns for the Gulag innocents in the West. Other than the survivors, no one cares about them in Russia. The author brings this up as an example that the Russia has not learned from its past. "...if we really knew what Stalin did to the Chechens, and if we felt that it was a terrible crime against the Chechen nation, it is not only Vladimir Putnin who would be unable to sit back and watch with any equanimity" page 575. If the topic of this book were not so serious, then most of what happened sounds like the "theatre of the absurd." For example, the camp administration was "supposed" to take good care of the prisoners. For the camps were an "economic" asset to the State. However, the author points out that there was no incentive, for the most part, to make sure inmates did not die. There was an "official" written policy. Then there was what really happened. I hope I am still alive, if and when the rest of the Gulag archives are opened. I am sending this book to Latvia.
Rating:
Summary: An Important Book
Review: For anyone who has seen any of Tom Clancy's earlier works, the Gulag would have been impossible to miss. The Russian prison which by uttering the very word which was its name would create tension throughout a room. American propoganda fueled Clancy's awe for the system during the Cold War period. The next in line happened to be a journalist named Anne Applebaum. "Gulag" is an important book for understanding the truths and lies spread by Americans about the Russian system of high-security imprisonment. The book does not salute any actions taken by the Russians but does manage to dispel a few of the rumors along the way. For anyone with interest in the old Soviet Union and more specifically the infamous gulag, this is a MUST read. And for those who are only interested in finding a fact or two to spice up a conversation, this book is written in such a way which is lucid and intelligently pleasing to the brain.
Rating:
Summary: A fine study of a neglected subject
Review: As a professional historian (although one with no expertise in Eastern Europe), I am impressed with what I fear may be denigrated by the author's ideological opponents as a work of journalism. Applebaum has keen historical imagination, and her research has been remarkably thorough under the circumstances. (She also has a fine writing style; it's a pleasure to watch the care with which she crafts her text.) Applebaum might have made of this work nothing more than a string of horrors, a secular Foxe's Book of Martyrs. That she can communicate the terrifying nature of the Gulag and its incalculable human cost while simultaneously suggesting the larger historical issues is a testimony to her gifts as a historian.
Rating:
Summary: This history must not be forgotten or rewritten
Review: The real contemporary significance of this work must not be overlooked. It is less than twenty years ago that intellectuals and college professors in the U.S. and elsewhere, sometimes unknowingly using source materials now traceable to KGB funding, were denying or minimizing the Gulags and the other evils of Leninism/Stalinism. Some have seen the error of their ways, e.g., the French leftists who assembled the Black Book of Communism, in which they tabulate Communist regimes' responsibility for the deaths of at least 85 to 100 million of their own citizens. But then there are others. In the April 22, 2003 issue of The Nation, George McGovern made a passing reference to Communism as a "great hobgoblin", i.e., something harmless that's used to unnecessarily scare people. Applebaum's book, using even more newly uncovered documentation, shows that there was plenty to be scared of.
Rating:
Summary: Seminal
Review: A must have book. Not as eloquent as Solzehnitsyn but thoroughly detailed and documented horrors of Gulag (and communism)
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