Rating: 
Summary: A difficult, but needed work
Review: I suspect the definitive history of the Gulag system is still some decades away, and will likely be written by a Russian. Nevertheless, this is a good early survey. The Author brings a journalist's immediacy rather than a historian's depth to the project, and at this point, perhaps that is best. She spent a great deal of effort and time interviewing, searching archives, and reviewing the available memoirs to put together this volume. As the access to the archives seems to be in some question for now, this will likely be the benchmark work in English for some time. For those who have not experienced the reality of the Soviet system, this is a good introduction. Acronymns and Soviet terms are clearly explained, and kept to a minimum, so a familiarity of Soviet history is not required. This is an accesible account, that will appeal to the general reader, although by no means an easy subject. One complaint, as an American, I was disappointed that the author did not include as a source Polish-American Jesuit Walter Ciszek, who spent 23 years in Stalin's prisons and camps, although the memoirs of American Alexander Dolgun are. As the author laments, there is still perhaps a certain amount of, if not denial, at least unwillingness by many Russians to delve into this topic. In time, I feel certain that will change. The cold war ended, thankfully, not with a bang, but a wimper. No allied troops marched into Moscow. The Soviet regime collapsed of its own corruption and flawed ideology. The Russians themselves will have to come to grips with the reality of their history. Perhaps this book can be another helpful step in the process.
Rating: 
Summary: A superb work
Review: As someone who has spent plenty of time studying the Soviet Union, this has to be considered one of the best on the subject to come out in some time. Not only does the book include a great amount of detail, the author helps us make sense of it and puts it in perspective. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Evil does exist
Review: This book underscores the evil that was and still is Communism. In a profound way it also celebrates the human freedom allowed by free-enterprise and capitalism. Communist states rely so much on forcd labor that they ultimately doom themselves to economic stagnation and finally the collapse of their government. The Gulag system forced production for the state by isolating many of the best and the brightest, the very people who spurred success in the West, in forced labor camps. This book demonstrates the Hitler's evil was not the only abhorrent system of government in Europe and the introduction shows that Western commplicity is why Communism is still, to this day, not roundly reviled. An excellent book
Rating:
Summary: Communism Laid Bare..
Review: In this immensely impressive work by Pulitzer prize winning author Anne Applebaum, we learn of a world eerily distant to us. As Americans, we have been rightly exposed to massive amounts of narrative, scholarly examination, and media views of the Nazi Holocaust. Yet, the decimation, abuse, and inhumanity that characterized the Soviet Union and her Gulag labor system for over 30 years seems to go unnoticed. This is perhaps for political reasons, as it may not serve certain political interests to have a communist nation take her place as the most murderous state in history. This conscious neglect may also stem from the fact that the horror is so distant, having taken place in the often frozen wastes of distant and always mysterious Russia. Whatever the reason, Ms. Applebaum has brilliantly cut through the ignorance on the subject and delivered an earth shattering look at one of the most brutal human institutions ever devised. Expertly weaving together the massive history of the labor system and the government structure that supported it along with the smaller stories from survivors, Applebaum gives the reader the total picture. It is eye opening in its authenticity and gripping in its historical intensity. The first thing that should strike you about the book is how complex the story itself is. The history of the gulag is not as simple as the highly streamlined and relatively orderly Nazi system. Indeed, in the beginning of gulag development, the Communist justice system was as chaotic as it was cruel. When it became clear to Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders that they would need massive camps to place all their "class enemies", the system was slow to action. In combination with the realization that the wide swaths of mother Russia held massive amounts of natural resources however, the system began to become more orderly. Still, starvation, failure, and misdirection were the orders of the day. Only when Stalin came to power did the camps take on a new role, as a perfect tool for fear and oppression. Along with the NKVD, Stalin used the gulag to not only serve the Soviets economic needs (which it never truly did) but also to serve as the sword of his cult of personality. So many from so many different strata of society were jailed, and many of these people disappeared forever. More deadly than official execution, the gulags became houses of death because of bad working conditions and often barbaric living situations. The gulags developed into a fairly official way to keep the oppressed in line, but they also served to undermine the Soviet Union's national spirit. Even when the system was mostly dismantled soon after the death of Stalin, the gulags served as a bleeding wound to the image of the "worker's paradise". This book is far beyond simple historical recreation however, it also deals with the human face of the gulag. While numerous and celebrated memoirs have been published in the United States, Applebaum expertly crystallizes these stories and creates a vivid picture of life in the gulag. We read gripping accounts of men, women, and even children ripped out of their ordinary lives and thrown into the vicious cycle that made up the Soviet forced labor system. The horror began at arrest, when the NKVD secret police would knock on the door in the middle of the night. Interrogation and transportation, usually under hellish conditions, added to the desperate condition of those arrested. All of these steps toward eventual internment are described with skillful tribute by Applebaum. Life in the camps was a mixture of terror and hope, as prisoners were forced to improvise in order to survive. New societies grew up in the gulags as more and more were shipped into them. The human form of the gulag was been written before, but never more crisp and readable than in this examination. There is little praise that I can foist on this already heralded title. Gulag is a tour de force of hidden history, a world distant to us laid bare by the expert words of Ms. Applebaum. Along the way, we see almost every possible aspect of the gulag system, along with its Soviet overlords. The role of the guards and the position of various Soviet leaders and apparatchiks are also highlighted. Of course, Applebaum points out the fact that international outcry was consistently muted because of the political disadvantages of criticizing a communist nation. It is a lesson to be learned, and history not to be forgotten. History on an epic scale, not to be missed.
Rating:
Summary: The Second Evil of the XX Century
Review: In the history of the XX Century, at least as seen from the "Euro-centric" point of view, there were two great evils. One was Nazism, the other one was - Communism. Unlike Nazism, however, the general perception of Communism was, and still remains today, ambivalent. So often we hear of a "great socialist idea gone wrong". Indeed, for a reader of Marx or Engels the Communism may seem very attractive remedy for the wrongs of a Capitalistic society. Yet the social and political revolution, so essential to "Marxism-Leninism", through dyctature inescapably leads to terror where the goals fully justify the means and all of the sudden killing or otherwise "eliminating" entire social classes of people, e.g. individual farmers ("kulaks") becomes a small price to pay on the altar of building "society of social justice and equality".
Anne Applebaum with her new work, through the analysis of the forced labor camp system, does a superb job of presenting Communism, especially Stalinism, , in the right perspective. It was an evil entirely on a par with Nazism, if not even worse. Only the confusion around the "theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism" and the fact that atrocities of the Soviet system had "domestic", if you will, character and were largely hidden from the plain view of a "Western eye" made this false perception possible. It has to be changed and this book is a great contribution to this end.
Having read so many laudatory comments from the fellow readers I can't possibly come up with anything new to commend this book. It is indeed the most comprehensive, most synthetic and most in-depth depiction and analysis of the Soviet forced labor camp system, the best since the famous "Gulag Archipelago" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
But I would add another reading recommendation, a book that was, as far as I can tell, the first to describe and analyze experience of living in the Gulag beyond just a memoir, one that any careful reader of this work will instantly recognize for Anne Applebaum acknowledges it as one of the main bibliographical sources and quotes from it very extensively. It is "World Apart" by Gustav Herling. Himself a Gulag prisoner and survivor Herling put his experiences of living in a forced labor camp on paper shortly after the WWII and published in 1951 in England. Unlike the voluminous works by Solzhenitsyn and Applebaum this one is relatively short and concise. And it is written in such a literary manner that it captivates reader completely, making him feel as if he were right there himself experiencing on his own skin the horrors of Gulag and seeing in his own eyes what can happen to a human being under such extreme circumstances.
One of the main thesis of Applebaum's work is that to understand the essence of the Soviet concentration camps one needs to treat it as a part of the history of the Soviet Union: "...the Gulag did not emerge, fully formed, from the sea, but rather reflected the general standards of the society around it. If the camps were filthy, if the guards were brutal (...) that was partly because filthiness and brutality (...) were plentiful in other spheres of Soviet life."
This point can and, in my view, needs to be taken one step further. For the history of the Soviet Union is a part of a still broader history of Russia itself. In this context another book comes to my mind. One by the Marquis de Custine: "Journey For Our Time". First published in France in 1843, it describes impressions of a French traveler (de Custine himself) to Czarist Russia in 1839 then ruled by Nicholas I. "The basic resemblances between the military and despotic rule of Nicholas I (...) and the absolutism of the Soviet regime are unmistakable". Indeed, one is left with a profound impression of how little changed between Czarist Russia and Bolshevik Soviet Union. This impression will, no doubt, be only further reinforced after reading another masterpiece, I highly recommend, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Notes from the Underground".
Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive and enlightening
Review: The average person does not know about the Russian Gulags and the millions it killed. As Applebaum points out, it is a forgotten holocaust that continued many years after the Nazis.
Applebaum give a comprehensive outline of the dynamic Russian political landscape and how it affected the Gulags and then peppers it with eye witness accounts of prisoners who were being directly affected by the governments policy at the time.
This really is an eye opener. Nazi genocide seemed so much simpler compared to the reasons Stalinist Communism could send you to a Gulag for. I couldnt help but think of Orwells big brother, double speak and the thought police when reading Appelbaums book.
The significance of history is only through what is remembered. There definitely needs to be more written about this important piece of history.
Rating:
Summary: If only Stalin knew ...
Review: Having read dozens of books on the Holocaust over the years, I was surprised at how emotionally draining I found this book. Statistics are inevitable in this subject - and also important: past disputes over the numbers of Stalin's dead (for example by Robert Conquest and his detractors) had to be fought. But Applebaum takes us beyond the numbers into the heartbreaking stories of the individual victims. Making extensive, but not uncritical use, of survivors' memoirs, she brings the horrors of the Gulag into distressingly sharp focus.
She also proffers some possible explanations for the Gulag system beyond merely asserting that Stalin was an evil paranoiac (which he undoubtedly was). I was interested to learn, for example, quite how strong the economic motive was for turning hundreds of thousands of innocent people into slave labourers. Stalin and the senior Bolsheviks saw this as a perfectly legitimate way of rapidly developing remote and primitive parts of the Russian hinterland.
I now wait, no doubt in vain, for one of the many surviving Western defenders of the Soviet system to admit their grotesque willful blindness and to apologise to its millions of victims.
Rating:
Summary: We must remember
Review: As a lay person wishing to know more, I was drawn to this book because it spelled out some things which need to be remembered. The value of history is that we learn from it but the learning stops when people close their eyes and minds to important information. Abuse of human beings is nothing new in world history but this book opens an area not previously exposed to the general public. As I write these words I have in front of me stories of great abuse that continue today in N. Korea. Knowing more about the Gulag is but the first step toward seeing that it doesn't happen again. Applebaum has done a fine job in helping to expose such awful events.
Rating:
Summary: Astounding!!!
Review: While in graduate school I studied the Gulag and found this book to offer the best interpretation of the horrific events that took place under the Stalin regime. Appelbaum reveals what the communist regime fought so hard to conceal. Readers may also want to watch the Russian film, "Burn by the Sun" which illustrates the extreme depths of Stalin's paranoia and hatred.
Rating:
Summary: Yeah, it's that good
Review: Reading this book was a fitting way to end my two years of living in Russia. Though it focuses on one specific aspect of Russian 20th century history - the labor camp system - it in many ways is a broader history of the inherent flaws of the Soviet Union and its cruelty. While it is a brutal condemnation of one of the most oppressive regimes of all time, and while it lays plenty of blame on contemporary Russian society and government for not taking more seriously their shameful past, this is by no means a book that is hateful towards Russia. Indeed, it is clear that the author cares greatly about this country and its people. And exposing in great detail the horrors of its past is, I think, an exercise in tough love.
This book truly does present a comprehensive history of the Gulag system. Usually when I finish a work of non-fiction I think to myself, "I wonder what else I could read on this subject." That thought did not cross my mind after reading this book. It's all here, all the atrocities, all the key figures, the personal stories of victims, the historical context. You won't need to read any more books on the Gulag after reading this one.
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