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Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum |
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CONCENTRATION CAMPS FORCED LABOR POLITICAL PRISONERS_SOVIET UNION PRISONS_SOVIET UNION SOVIET UNION_POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Description/Notes |
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The Gulag entered the world's historical consciousness in 1972, with the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's epic oral history of the Soviet camps, The Gulag Archipelago. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, dozens of memoirs and new studies covering aspects of that system have been published in Russia and the West. Using these new resources, as well as her own original historical research, Anne Applebaum has now undertaken, for the first time, a fully documented history of the Soviet camp system, from its origins in the Russian Revolution to its collapse in the era of glasnost. Anne Applebaum is a columnist and member of the editorial board of the Washington Post. Chapter 1 BOLSHEVIK BEGINNINGS But your spine has been smashed, My beautiful, pitiful era, And with an inane smile You look back, cruel and weak, Like an animal past its prime, At the prints of your own paws. --Osip Mandelstam, 'Vek'1 One of my goals is to destroy the myth that the cruelest era of repression began in 1936-37. I think that in future, statistics will show that the wave of arrests, sentences and exile had already begun at the beginning of 1918, even before the official declaration, that autumn, of the 'Red Terror.' From that moment, the wave simply grew larger and larger, until the death of Stalin . . . --Dmitrii Likhachev, Vospominaniya2 In the year 1917, two waves of revolution rolled across Russia, sweeping Imperial Russian society aside as if it were destroying so many houses of cards. After Czar Nicholas II abdicated in February, events proved extremely difficult for anyone to halt or control. Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the first post-revolutionary Provisional Government, later wrote that, in the void following the collapse of the old regime, 'all existing political and tactical programs, however bold and well conceived, appeared hanging aimlessly and uselessly in space.'3 But although the Provisional Government was weak, although popular dissatisfaction was widespread, although anger at the carnage caused by the First World War ran high, few expected power to fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks, one of several radical socialist parties agitating for even more rapid change. Abroad, the Bolsheviks were scarcely known. One apocryphal tale illustrates foreign attitudes very well: in 1917, so the story goes, a bureaucrat rushed into the office of the Austrian Foreign Minister, shouting, 'Your Excellency, there has been a revolution in Russia!' The minister snorted. 'Who could make a revolution in Russia? Surely not harmless Herr Trotsky, down at the Caf? Central?' If the nature of the Bolsheviks was mysterious, their leader, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov--the man the world would come to know by his revolutionary pseudonym, 'Lenin'--was even more so. During his many years as an ?migr? revolutionary, Lenin had been recognized for his brilliance, but also disliked for his intemperance and his factionalism. He picked frequent fights with other socialist leaders, and had a penchant for turning minor disagreements over seemingly irrelevant matters of dogma into major arguments.4 In the first months following the February Revolution, Lenin was very far from holding a position of unchallenged authority, even within his own Party. As late as mid-October 1917, a handful of leading Bolsheviks continued to oppose his plan to carry out a coup d'?tat against the Provisional Government, arguing that the Party was unprepared to take power, and that it did not yet have popular support. He won the argument, however, and on October 25 the coup took place. Under the influence of Lenin's agitation, a mob sacked the Winter Palace. The Bolsheviks arrested the ministers of the Provisional Government. Within hours, Lenin had become the leader of the country he renamed Soviet Russia. Yet although Lenin had succeeded in taking power, his Bolshevik critics had not been entirely wrong. The Bolsheviks were indeed wildly unprepared. As a result, most of their early decisions, including the creation of the one-party state, were taken to suit the needs of the moment. Their popular support was indeed weak, and almost immediately they began to wage a bloody civil war, simply in order to stay in power. >From 1918, when the White Army of the old regime regrouped to fight the new Red Army--led by Lenin's comrade, 'Herr Trotsky' from the 'Caf? Central'--some of the most brutal fighting ever seen in Europe raged across the 'GULAG is a monumental achievement, a masterpiece of Soviet history, indeed, one of the great historical epics of our time. With intense moral clarity, Anne Applebaum exposes not only the full horror of these slave labor camps -- Russia's legacy of state-sponsored genocide -- but the equally shocking, global amnesia towards the millions who died in them.' -Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II 'Combining meticulous research with myriad accounts of survivors, Gulag: A History illuminates a shadowed world in which millions perished under unspeakable conditions. Any who question why we fought the Cold War will find an answer.' -Henry A. Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State 'As the 20th century recedes into history, with all its hideous crimes and high ideals, wars and trials, lies and revelations, we still have an uneasy feeling of some unfulfilled duty left back there, like an unpaid debt or a dead body we did not commit to the ground. This ghost's name is Gulag - and this book, a comprehensive study of a subject most people try to forget, is a first attempt at exorcism.' -Vladimir Bukovsky, former Soviet dissident “An important and necessary book.” -Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China 'A monumental work that will long stand as a memorial of the countless victims of the Gulag, and also to the shame of the many erstwhile Gulag deniers.' -Zbigniew Brzezinski, Former National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter “Anne Applebaum’s work is very human, very readable, both rich in detail and highly impressive as an overview of the huge and dreadful GULAG phenomenon. The astonishing story comes alive in a new way, deep feeling combining with deep understanding.” -Robert Conquest, author of Stalin and The Great Terror 'Anne Applebaum's Gulag is the first up-to-date scholarly study of the central terror institution of the Soviet regime. It is distinguished not only by thorough research in the sources, many of them previously unknown, but by its humane treatment of the victims of this utterly inhuman institution.' -Richard Pipes, Professor of History Emeritus, Harvard University 'Anne Applebaum's Gulag is an important book. Her many years of scrupulous research have provided a wealth of fascinating detail to create a terrifying and unforgettable story.' -Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad |
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