Gulag: A History, a comprehensive history of the forced labor camps of the Soviet Union, published in 2003 and written by Anne Applebaum, won the Pulitzer Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award. It is a scholarly, fantastic book due to its sheer scope, as it talks about the history of the Gulag from its beginning to its ultimate end, as well as shedding light on how it impacted the people who were assimilated into it.
Applebaum writes in the introduction of the purpose of the book, as well as providing a description of the scope the Gulag operated at: “This is a history of the Gulag: a history of the vast network of labor camps that were once scattered across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, from the islands of the White Sea to the shores of the Black Sea, from the Arctic Circle to the plains of central Asia, from Murmansk to Vorkuta to Kazakhstan, from central Moscow to the Leningrad suburbs” (xv). Applebaum then describes what “Gulag” originally stood for: it was an acronym for “Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei,” or “Main Camp Administration” (xv). Applebaum then states that the term “Gulag,” over the years, has come to stand for Soviet totalitarianism as a whole, including “the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths” (xvi).
Applebaum provides an illustration of ignorance regarding Russian history: when she was walking across the Charles Bridge in Prague, she saw many items being sold, including paintings, jewelry, souvenirs, as well as clothing which bore the hammer and sickle. Applebaum then states that when the history of the Soviet Union is studied, it is just as repulsive as that of Nazi Germany, yet the people who bought clothing with the hammer and sickle engraved on them (who were mostly Americans and Western Europeans, ironically) would be perfectly fine with wearing it, but would loathe the idea of wearing a swastika armband. Applebaum then directly states that major indignation against Stalin’s atrocities was severely limited by many celebrities and famous people who acted as apologists. For instance, Jean-Paul Sartre defended Stalinist atrocities, telling people that Soviet atrocities were none of their business, and that he while he found the camps to be inhumane, but could do nothing about it.
Applebaum states throughout the book of the comparisons to be made between the Gulag camps and the Nazi concentration camps, as while the Soviets may not have been as organized when it came to mass murder when compared to the Nazis, they still destroyed their people: “the Soviet Union found other ways to mass-murder hundreds of thousands of its citizens … they were driven to a forest at night, lined up, shot in the skull, and buried in mass graves before they ever got near a concentration camp” (xxxix). Furthermore, “there are stories of Soviet secret police using exhaust fumes - a primitive form of gas - to kill prisoners, such as the Nazis did in their early years,” and “In certain Soviet camps, at certain times, death was virtually guaranteed for those selected to cut trees in the winter forest or to work in the worst of the Kolyma gold mines” (xxxix). If the Gulags can be summarized in the following sentences: “In Germany you could die of cruelty, in Russia you could die of despair. In Auschwitz you could die in a gas chamber, in Kolyma you could freeze to death in the snow” (xl).
Applebaum describes the Gulag as having originated from Bolshevik paranoia involving class warfare, and soon after establishing power, they appointed the Cheka, the Soviet Union’s first secret police. The first Gulag took place in Solovetsky, an island which once housed a monastery. Applebaum then establishes that the Soviet economic system was supposed to rely on the Gulags as a means of raising revenue, but the overall project was a disappointment, for many of the Gulags not only failed to be profitable (by using slave labor), but had failed to even become self-sustaining. Applebaum then discusses the case of Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel, “a prisoner who rose through the ranks to become one of the most influential Solovetsky commanders” (31). This instance of Frenkel illustrates a key difference between Gulags and Nazi concentration camps: while Kapos in Nazi camps do have a certain degree of power, the possibilities for a better life was likeliker for people in the Gulag, for some prisoners became guards. Frenkel ascended to power from the bottom of Solovetsky’s hierarchy, in no small doubt by impressing the future head of the secret police, Genrikh Yagoda, by writing anonymously “a very precise letter, describing exactly what was wrong with every single one of the camp’s industries, forestry, farming, and brick-making among them” (33). Not long after Yagoda received Frenkel’s letter, Frenkel was released and became a commander of the camp. He enacted reforms, making Solovetsky self-sustaining and profitable, to the point where it began taking jobs from industries in the Soviet Union. When the Great Terror occurred in the 1930s, Frenkel survived, as Applebaum speculates that Stalin himself might have given him immunity.
The Gulags, after the initial ones, including Solovetsky, began increasing in frequency, to such a degree that the Soviet Union became inevitably dependent upon its existence to some degree for labor. Stalin also stated in a speech that the Bolsheviks had been too lenient upon their initial ascension to power, and that they must destroy all their enemies, and that even leniency towards supposed “class enemies” was a crime. As the camps increased, the amount of prisoners skyrocketed. Many of those who ended up in the Gulags were convicted of imaginary crimes during waves of mass arrests or even during peacetime, while others were political prisoners or petty criminals. In some instances, even children were sent to the Gulags for minor crimes, like stealing food in order to avoid starvation.
Stalin also enlisted the help of Maxim Gorky, a famous novelist, to be a shameless apologist for the Gulag system. When Gorky visited a Gulag, he said that it was “‘excellent’” and that he also wrote “admiringly of the living conditions, clearly intending his readers to understand that a Soviet labor camp was not at all the same thing as a capitalist labor camp” (43). Gorky went even so far as to say that the Gulags had “‘no resemblance to a prison, instead it seems as if these rooms are inhabited by passengers rescued from a drowned ship’” (43). 1929 was a pivotal year when it came to the Gulags, for it was known as the “Stalinist Revolution” due to Stalin’s attempts to increase his own power, for “in 1929, Stalin was not yet the dictator he would become by the end of the following decade” (45). Not long after 1929, a terrible man-made famine, known as the Holodomor, broke out in Ukraine and other areas, killing millions. Many of the starving were sent to the Gulags, and when Stalin decided to pursue rapid industrialization, he made it apparent to his subordinates that he wished for the Gulag to provide a large amount of the labor.
One of the most infamous Gulag projects was the White Sea Canal, and it clearly illustrates the absurdity of the Soviet system, as even though it was gargantuan in scale, “Everything, from the wheelbarrows to the scaffolding, was handmade. One inmate remembered that ‘there was no technology whatsoever. Even ordinary automobiles were a rarity. Everything was done by hand, sometimes with the help of horses’” (64). Even worse, the White Sea Canal required 170,000 prisoners as well as certain exiles to function and in the end, due to the brutal Karelian winter, more than 25,000 of these prisoners died. In the end, the White Sea Canal was a gigantic failure, as not only did it cause the deaths of so many people, but once it was “completed” it failed at its purpose: most goods were moved by railway, and the water in the White Sea Canal was “so shallow that ‘not even submarines can pass through it under their own power; they have to be loaded on barges’” (72).
When it came to the prisoners themselves, it is to be reiterated that most of those who were arrested in the Great Terror and other mass movements of hysteria were in fact innocent, and were only arrested since the NKVD, the Soviet secret police following the Cheka, were given quotas for arrests and executions by Stalin. When most of the prisoners were sent to the Gulag, they arrived there disheveled and psychologically and physically devastated - torture frequently followed arrest, and prisoners would be fed next to nothing during the commute to the camps. Applebaum describes that the guards would frequently deny the prisoners food and drink since there were so many prisoners, not to mention that the guards would rather spend the time relaxing.
Prisoners were also commonly brought to the Gulag via boats, and these boats had terribly inhumane standards of living, as gang rapes were common - a survivor, Glink, stated that “no one was ever punished for rape on board these ships” (171). Robbery of Polish and Baltic prisoners, who enjoyed better possessions and better clothes than the Soviets, was also common, as “On one occasion, a group of criminal prisoners turned out the ship lights and attacked a group of Polish prisoners, killing some and robbing the rest” (171). In another instance of depravity and deprivation, 1,402 were sent on a ship, the SK 950, and in the end, 53 had died and 66 were hospitalized. Furthermore, “On arrival, a further 335 were hospitalized with third or fourth degree frostbite, pneumonia, and other diseases” (174). The convoy took a total of sixty days, but 24 of these days involved the prisoners “not moving, sitting on side tracks” because of “‘poor organization’” (174). A survivor, Nina Gagen-Torn, said that the convoy guards who didn't care about the safety and health of the prisoners weren’t evil - they just “‘didn't look at us as people. We were living cargo’” (174).
When it came to their structure, most Gulags had a “zona,” or “prison zone,” made distinguishable by the surrounding barbed wire. On the other hand, “If the camp or colony was located near or within a city, the barbed-wire fence was usually replaced by a wall or fence made of bricks or wood, so that no one approaching the site would be able to see in from the outside” (186). Following procedure, prisoners, along with their guards, would enter the Gulag through the vakhta, which translates to “guardhouse.” These guardhouses would record who would enter and who would leave to prevent potential escapes. Another accessory of monitoring was embodied in watchtowers made of wood. The Gulags were also unique in that, unlike Nazi concentration camps, they commonly had an indistinguishable boundary which allowed prisoners some autonomy - this made sense due to the crippling effect of fear as well as the geography. Since many of the camps were located in Siberia and other freezing areas and were far from civilization, even if the prisoners were to escape, they would most likely freeze to death in the cold. In a subsection of the Soviet Union, Kolyma, the cold effectively prevented many escapes, as untold numbers of people died from frostbite alone (estimates are hard to come across, since Stalin had the evidence concerning the death toll destroyed).
When it comes down to the rules, the prisoners would listen to the guards as well as to the more experienced prisoners. There were even bathhouses in the Gulags, though the quality was obviously horrid, seeing how “there was often so little water that it was impossible to get clean. Prisoners were given ‘a wooden basin with not very hot water … there is no extra water and no one can buy any,’” and in many instances, the bathhouses lacked any kind of heating system. The prisoners were extremely frail and malnourished when it came to the crushing amount of work (frequently more than 10 hours of intensive labor a day), a problem which was only exacerbated by a starvation diet which lacked vitamins and nutrients. Applebaum describes that while the prisoners would starve to death, the “norms for ‘officers of the armed forces’ expressly stipulated vitamin C and dried fruit to compensate for the lack of vitamins in the regular rations,” and “Generals and admirals” were even allowed by law “to receive cheese, caviar, canned fish, and eggs” (209). It is also worth noting that when it came to military officers who would serve in the Gulag, most of them were the leftovers of their respective classes, and were frequently deemed unfit to fight in a war.
Starvation was such a massive issue in the Gulags that many prisoners would bribe the guards or senior prisoners for jobs relating to food, such as peeling potatoes “simply to be in a position to steal food” (212). Like Nazi concentration camps, bread was a cultural staple of the Gulag, as in times of neglect and shortages, it “took on an almost sacred status,” as while “camp thieves stole almost everything else with impunity, for example, the theft of bread was considered particularly heinous and unforgivable” (213). That is, if you are to thieve in a Gulag, getting caught stealing bread is an automatic death sentence. As a survivor, Kaimierz Zarod, noticed in one particular incident: “‘If a prisoner stole clothes, tobacco, or almost anything else and was discovered, he could expect a beating … but the unwitting law of the camp - and I have heard from men from other camps that it was the same everywhere - was that a prisoner caught stealing another’s bread earned a death sentence’” (214). When it came to dispatching prisoners caught thieving bread, it was noted by Dmitri Panin, a friend of the famed author Solzhenitsyn, that the thief would be thrown into the air by a myriad of prisoners and allowed to crash back down, which would damage their kidneys. After this is repeated multiple times, he would be thrown out of the barracks to die.
One of the main absurdities of the Soviet system was that the guards and authorities of the Soviet Union genuinely believed they were helping the prisoners see the errors of their imaginary crimes through hard labor, and wanted to hear positive feedback from the prisoners. Applebaum then states the economic purpose of the Gulag: “prisoners were not meant to suffer - or perhaps it is more accurate to say that no one cared if they did or not. Far more important was that they fit into a camp production plan and fulfill a work norm … a certain number of cubic meters of wood to be cut down, of ditches to be dug, of coal to be hauled” (221). Prisoners were also made to sing patriotic songs (one of the songs even praised Beria, the sadistic head of the NKVD who managed the Gulag) and were encouraged to work hard (“shock workers”), as they were offered praise in camp announcements, given a bigger food portion, and receive visits from family. The last incentive is sometimes ironic, as when some prisoners met with their respective spouses, their spouses made it clear to them that the sole reason for their visit was to request a divorce, which subsequently demoralized them and defeated the entire purpose of the arrangement. The punishment for failing to do one’s daily quota could involve isolation in extremely filthy and thermally extreme cells (cells could be extremely hot, others would be freezing). When it came to crimes like attempted escape, the prisoner would be executed.
Prisoners, over long periods of time in the Gulag (if they survived that long), would learn how to identify key types of prisoners. For instance, “The highest-ranking thieves not only sounded different but also looked different from other prisoners … In the 1940s … the Kolyma thieves-in-law all wore aluminum crosses around their necks, with no religious intent” (287). In another instance, Georgy Feldgun, an inmate of the Gulag, stated that thieves walked in a unique way - “‘with small steps, legs held slightly apart’” (287). Applebaum states that when it came to the quality of life and survival in the Gulags, criminal gangs were a powerful force, as everyday criminals who were sent to the Gulag would commonly have their association to fall back on, and received better treatment from the guards because their crimes weren’t political. Political prisoners, on the other hand, were generally more terrified and were more prone to the guard’s abuse, as their crimes were seen as extremely devious, as they supposedly tried to damage the very foundation of the totalitarian government of the Soviet Union.
While most prisoners in the Gulags were men, some were women. Applebaum discusses that women, like men, made friendships in the camps to survive, but they were also sexually used and abused by officials in the Gulag, and many times they cooperated in order to increase their chances of survival. An interesting aspect of the Gulag system regarding women was that women who were pregnant or have given birth were given better treatment, which led some to deliberately get pregnant and subsequently give birth: “These were usually criminal women or those convicted of petty crimes who wanted to be pregnant so as to be excused from hard work, to receive slightly better food, and to benefit, possibly, from the periodic amnesties given to women with small children” (318). This is extremely ironic to me, as even though the desire of these women for a better life is understandable, by giving birth they are sentencing an innocent to a world of suffering in the Gulag, which is both selfish and amoral.
Like everything else, even dying in the Gulag had its own culture. Experienced prisoners could tell who is likely to die, and when they sense the end is near, they would surround the dying prisoner and strip them of all their belongings, leaving them to die of exposure and starvation. Of course, not all the prisoners died that way - some were killed in accidents. Others committed suicide to no longer suffer, and this commonly took the shape of walking outside the camp perimeter to be shot by the guards. Evgeniya Ginzburg, whose friend Polina Melnikoza hung herself, wrote that “‘She had asserted her rights to be a person by acting as she had, and she had made an efficient job of it’” (340). Unsurprisingly, a large number of people committed suicide as a form of protest, as a form of defiance: “‘By committing suicide, one altars the course of events - if only for the last time in one’s life - instead of simply reacting to them’” (340). Some prisoners simply lost the will to live, and were termed “zeks.” Those who no longer had the will to live would generally stop caring about life itself, seen most clearly with bread, and would wait for disease and starvation to do their part.
Though escape and rebellion were difficult, seeing the awful state the prisoners were condemned to, they did happen, as seen in the following rule instituted in some areas: “There are also records of guards who foiled escapes. A 300-rubled prize was awarded to a prison guard who sounded the alarm after escaping prisoners had suffocated a night watchman. His boss received 200 rubles, as did another prison chief, and the soldiers involved received 100 rubles apiece” (393). Inspiringly, Applebaum describes that no Gulag was completely immune to escape, as even Solovetsky, that island which “was thought to be impregnable,” saw its escapes - “in 1928, in which half-a-dozen prisoners attacked their guards and broke through the gates of the camp. Most got away, probably escaping over the Finnish border too” (393). In another remarkable instance, prisoners were able to steal boats and escaped “by water, presumably to Finland,” which caused the camp boss to be removed from his position (394). When WWII began, and the Soviet Union began releasing some prisoners from the Gulags to “redeem” themselves by fighting for the country they supposedly betrayed, some prisoners took advantage of the action to escape.
When WWII ended, escapes still occurred - “In 1947, when escapes reached their postwar height, 10,440 prisoners attempted escape, of whom only 2,894 were caught” (395). When it came to the nature of the escapees, most of the escapees were professional criminals. When it came to political prisoners, they “escaped much less often,” seeing that “Not only did they lack the network and the expertise, but they were also pursued with greater fervor,” as detailed by a man named Tchernavin: “‘The guards did not take the escape of criminals very seriously … they would be caught when they came out to the railroad or reached a town. But for the pursuit of political prisoners, posses would be organized at once: sometimes all neighboring villages would be mobilized and the frontier guards called to assist. The political prisoner always tried to escape abroad - in his motherland he had no refuge’” (396).
When it came to the mortality rate of the Gulags, during WWII they were staggeringly high, as food shortages were common - “352,560 prisoners died in 1942, or one in four. One in five, or 267,826, died in 1943 … typhus, dysentery, and other epidemics swept through the camps” (414). In certain areas where Nazi forces invaded quickly, the NKVD attempted to evacuate the prisoners into the heartland of Russia, and they did so with ruthless efficiency. A survivor of a march by the NKVD remarked that Soviet soldiers were great at bayoneting people, as when they stabbed one of her friends in the back for being too slow, she realized that “‘hers had been an easy death, easier than that of others. She didn't see that bayonet. She didn't have time to be afraid’” (419). In total, the NKVD, calculated by Applebaum, “evacuated 750,000 prisoners from 27 camps and 210 labor colonies,” and “Another 140,000 were evacuated from 272 prisons, and sent to new prisons in the east” (419). While it is impossible to discern the exact number, Applebaum writes that a significant percentage of evacuated prisoners died on the way to their new prisons.
When WWII ended, all the Nazi concentration camps were closed forever for good, but the opposite was the case for the Gulag - the Gulag reached its zenith after WWII. Applebaum writes that the Gulag reached its peak in the early 1950s, as when the Soviet Union expanded into new areas, they arrested many foreigners and brought them into the camp system. Applebaum states that “According to official statistics, on January 1, 1950, the Gulag contained 2,561,351 prisoners in the camps and colonies of its system - a million more than there had been five years earlier, in 1945” (463). In “The second half of 1948 and the first half of 1949,” Stalin ordered that those who had been arrested in the Great Terror a decade earlier were to be re-arrested again. This was completely absurd, like most of his policies, seeing how those who had been sentenced to the Gulags in the Great Terror were generally given “tenners,” or ten-year-sentences - moments after their release they were rearrested. Stalin then ordered that most of those who were re-arrested were to be sentenced into perpetual exile, “usually in particularly remote and underpopulated regions of the country: Kolyma, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Kazakhstan. There, most would live lives of unrelenting tedium. Shunned by the local communities as ‘enemies,’ they found it difficult to find living space, difficult to work” (464). Most of those who were re-arrested, upon learning of their fates, were indifferent and cold to the idea of further punishment, as the “first arrest had been a shock, but also a learning experience: many had been forced to confront the truth about their political system for the first time,” which made them expect further injustice and absurdity (464).
At the end of Stalin’s life, he suspected his doctors of trying to poison him, as some of them were Jewish. Overall, “Hundreds more Jewish doctors were arrested. Other Jews lost their jobs, as a wave of bitter anti-Semitism swept across the country” (475). Fortunately for everyone, Stalin soon died of a stroke (he was found to be mostly unconscious and paralyzed, and had even defecated in his pants, which reflects the principle of karma, as no one wanted to check on him for a long time since they were afraid he would send them to the Gulags for interrupting whatever he was doing). After Stalin’s death, the authorities generally agreed that the Gulags should be greatly reduced in influence. Strangely enough, when some prisoners heard of his death, they were saddened. Most, however, were overjoyed and thankful, believing that things would change for the better, but were afraid of provoking the guards to violence.
Although some prisoners were released and random and arbitrary arrests were greatly reduced, reforms were still limited, leading to many revolts in the camps. The revolts, while being unsuccessful on a technical note, clearly showed that times had changed, as the guards who shot the prisoners were classified as criminals, and the prisoners demanded for “the reduction of all twenty-five-year sentences; the review of all political prisoners’ cases; the liquidation of the punishment cells and punishment barracks; more freedom for prisoners to communicate with relatives; the removal of the requirement of forced eternal exile for freed prisoners; easier living conditions for women prisoners; and a permanent reuniting of the men’s and women’s camps” (502). In one especially famous incident, a certain camp rebelled and established its own autonomy, and made Soviet officials so frightened that they had to send tanks in to put the rebellion down.
The Gulags themselves were finally closed in 1986, 41 years after the end of WWII. The path had been a long and tortuous one, but the prisoners finally achieved their objective of the destruction of the Gulag and some political freedoms. When the policies of “glasnost” (openness) and “perestroika” (restructuring) were introduced, more prisoners were freed, and when Gorbachev gave a relatively honest speech about the true state of the Soviet Union, he accidentally caused the entire system to fall apart: Gorbachev couldn’t see, even years later, of “the link between the press revelations of the glasnost era and the collapse of Soviet communism. Gorbachev did not realize, simply, that once the truth had been told about the Stalinist past, the myth of Soviet greatness would be impossible to sustain. There had been too much cruelty, too much bloodshed, and too many lies about both” (563). This clearly demonstrates that truth, when it is revealed to the public, is one of the best antidotes to fanaticism, cruelty, and ignorance.
Applebaum writes of the importance of history in the end of her fantastic book, as she details that when she visited Russia, many people were angry at her for writing about the camps, as it wasn’t “relevant” anymore, though this was clearly inaccurate, seeing how “The old Stalinist division between categories of humanity, between the all-powerful elite and the worthless ‘enemies’ lives on in the new Russian elite’s arrogant contempt for its fellow citizens. Unless that elite soon comes to recognize the value and the importance of all of Russia’s citizens, to honor both their civil and their human rights, Russia is ultimately fated to become … a land populated by impoverished peasants and billionaire politicians who keep their assets in Swiss bank vaults and their private jets on runways, engines running” (573). Applebaum then describes that Russia’s “lack of interest in its past has deprived the Russians of heroes, as well as victims,” and that Russians can learn to be proud of those who conquered their animalistic instincts and the terrible situations they found themselves in, not just of military victories and successful campaigns.
Applebaum then talks more of the importance of history, as “For if we go on forgetting half of Europe’s history, some of what we know about mankind itself will be distorted. Every one of the twentieth-century’s mass tragedies was unique: the Gulag, the Holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the Nanking massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian revolution, the Bosnian wars, among many others … Only our ability to debase and destroy and dehumanize our fellow men has been - and will be - repeated again and again” (576). If, on the other hand, we learn of history, we can be better people as a whole. Applebaum writes poignantly that she wrote the book not to prevent barbaric actions from happening again, but precisely because of the fact that terrible deeds committed by Homo Sapiens will continue to occur - “We need to know why - and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, a part of the explanation. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are” (577). Applebaum then tells the audience that 28.7 million people were sent to the Gulag and approximately 2,749,163 perished.
Personal thoughts:
Gulag: A History is a fantastic, detailed, scholarly account of the Gulag labor camps. The numerous firsthand accounts of the camps from survivors were very helpful, as they showed that history goes beyond dates and statistics. The book itself is long, and, as said before, detailed, but that shouldn’t be much of a problem for anyone reading the book, for the topic itself is important and the opposite of boring. I highly recommend Applebaum’s fantastic work for those interested in European history, human nature, and the relationships governments have with their people.
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