Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps

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S.A. Krasilnikov, “Rozhdenia GULAGa: Diskusii v Verkhnikh Eshelonakh Vlasti,” Istoricheskii Arkhiv, No. 4 (1997), pp. 142-156. For Stalin’s interventions, see Lars Lih, Oleg Naumov, and Oleg Khlevniuk, editors, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov (Yale University Press, 1995), p. 212. The Known World' Wins Pulitzer Prize for Fiction". The New York Times. April 6, 2004 . Retrieved March 2, 2020. a b Neacşu, Dana (January 2004). "Advocacy As History? That Takes The Prize! [Review of the book Gulag: A History, by A. Applebaum]". Santa Clara Law Review. 45 (1): 213. Forced labour had been used by the tsars; but although the communists were not slow to arrest political enemies and conduct terror, it was not until Stalin introduced his first five-year plan at the end of the 1920s that a consolidated system of labour camps was fully established in the USSR. The author highlights the importance of economic motives in the politburo's policy. The first camps were established in the inhospitable regions of the Russian north, eastern Siberia and elsewhere where natural resources awaited exploitation and where free labourers were reluctant to settle. It was a massive operation requiring a huge structure of personnel and institutions. Over it all stood the OGPU (forerunner of the KGB), soon to be incorporated in the NKVD. Successive police chiefs Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria refined the procedures so that the Main Administration of Camps (the Gulag, in its Russian acronym) might function normally as an integral organ of the Soviet institutional network.

A titanic achievement: learned and moving and profound. . . . No reader will easily forget Applebaum’s vivid accounts of the horrible human suffering of the Gulag.”— National Review Cassidy, Alan; Loser, Philipp (December 27, 2016). "Ähnlich wie in den 1930er-Jahren". Tages-Anzeiger (in German). ISSN 1422-9994 . Retrieved April 3, 2017.An important book. . . . It is fervently to be hoped that people will read Anne Applebaum’s excellent, tautly written, and very damning history.”— The New York Times Book Review Applebaum goes on to recount the events of revolutions that occurred within many camps after the death of Stalin, given the widespread rumors and preoccupation on the fate of the camps. After failed protests and strikes within the Gulags, especially that of the Kengir uprising, the leaders of the Soviet Union began to plan for the dissolution of the camps. What this means is that although the official numbers of prisoners who died are lower than might have been expected–they peaked at 25 percent of the 1.7 million camp population in 1942, and, if they are to be believed, normally hovered around 3 to 5 percent–the number of Soviet citizens with some experience of labor camps is significantly higher. Adding up the totals for all of the years between 1930 and 1953, and factoring in the turnover, it is safe to say that some 18 million Soviet citizens had experience of camps, and perhaps another 15 million had experience of some other form of forced labor.9 Yet even these estimates include neither those shot before they made it to the camps nor the plight of families left behind. Wives of prisoners lost their jobs; children were forced into orphanages which were hardly more than breeding grounds for epidemics. Many died as a result, but how many? Anne Applebaum Joins The Atlantic as Staff Writer". The Atlantic. November 15, 2019 . Retrieved April 13, 2020. Nevertheless, the “camp-industrial complex” had, as such, disappeared by the 1960s. Exactly what proportion of the population had at some time been part of it still remains, unfortunately, a subject of controversy. I say “unfortunately” not only because the question of numbers detracts attention from more interesting revelations, but because it is impossible to resolve. At one point, Berdinskikh mentions that it was common practice in the Vyatskii camp to release prisoners who were on the point of dying, thereby lowering camp death statistics. In view of the culture of inspection and reprimand, that was probably the case in many camps; the death statistics are almost certainly distorted.

Applebaum, Anne (December 20, 2016). "I was a victim of a Russian smear campaign. I understand the power of fake news". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286 . Retrieved April 11, 2017.

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Bihun, Yaro (November 10, 2017). "Anne Applebaum honored with Antonovych Award". The Ukrainian Weekly . Retrieved January 1, 2022. This landmark book uncovers for the first time in detail one of the greatest horrors of the twentieth century: the vast system of Soviet camps that were responsible for the deaths of countless millions. Lazareva, Inna (January 4, 2013). "Through a (communist) looking glass, then and now". Haaretz . Retrieved December 11, 2021. Applebaum has been a vocal critic of Western conduct regarding the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. In an article in The Washington Post on March 5, 2014, she maintained that the US and its allies should not continue to enable "the existence of a corrupt Russian regime that is destabilizing Europe", noting that the actions of President Vladimir Putin had violated "a series of international treaties". [47] On March 7, in another article on The Daily Telegraph, discussing an information war, Applebaum argued that "a robust campaign to tell the truth about Crimea is needed to counter Moscow's lies". [48] At the end of August, she asked whether Ukraine should prepare for "total war" with Russia and whether central Europeans should join them. [49] As a student, Applebaum spent the summer of 1985 in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia), which, she has written, helped to shape her opinions. [13] She was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. As a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics, she earned a master's degree in international relations (1987). [14] She studied at St Antony's College, Oxford, before becoming a correspondent for The Economist and moving to Warsaw, Poland, in 1988. [15]

Freeman, Jay (March 15, 2003). "* Applebaum, Anne. Gulag". Booklist. American Library Association. 99 (14). In 2014, writing in The New York Review of Books she asked (in a review of Karen Dawisha's Putin's Kleptocracy) whether "the most important story of the past twenty years might not, in fact, have been the failure of democracy, but the rise of a new form of Russian authoritarianism". [50] She has described the "myth of Russian humiliation" and argued that NATO and EU expansion have been a "phenomenal success". [51] In July 2016, before the US election, she wrote about connections between Donald Trump and Russia [52] and wrote that Russian support for Trump was part of a wider Russian political campaign designed to destabilize the West. [53] In December 2019, she wrote in The Atlantic that "in the 21st century, we must also contend with a new phenomenon: right-wing intellectuals, now deeply critical of their own societies, who have begun paying court to right-wing dictators who dislike America." [54] Central Europe [ edit ] Applebaum, Anne (December 12, 2019). "The False Romance of Russia". The Atlantic . Retrieved September 27, 2021. According to the records of their conversations, the ministers and Politburo members who were planning what was to become one of the cruelest prison systems in the world never discussed the need to punish prisoners, never mentioned their living conditions, and certainly never referred to the official ideology of “re-education” in their internal debates about the new system, which went on for about a year. Stalin, although not present, took a great interest in the proceedings, occasionally intervening if the “wrong” conclusions were reached.4 Bare statistics also mask other, more interesting facts, most notably the startlingly high rate of turnover. In 1943, for example, 2,421,000 prisoners passed through the Gulag system, although the totals at the beginning and end of that year show a decline from 1.5 to 1.2 million. Prisoners dropped off the rolls because they died, because they escaped (more often than is usually realized), because they had short sentences, because they were being released into the Red Army, or because they had been promoted to guard or administrator.Bread became the object of obsessive desire. Theft of it was one of the few forms of behaviour which drew universal hostility from prisoners whether they were politicals or ordinary criminals. Few inmates thought murder too strong a reaction for thieving a person's bread ration. Applebaum, Anne; Lucas, Edward (May 6, 2016). "The danger of Russian disinformation". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286 . Retrieved April 3, 2017. Applebaum] deploys the roles of both historian and hostess to impressive effect. A penetrating work of ethnography, a novel study of the intellectual tribe to which the author belongs.” — The Sunday Times (London) verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{

Anne Applebaum. Żona Radosława Sikorskiego to dziś jedna z najbardziej wpływowych Polek". Portal I.pl. Times of Polska. August 31, 2013 . Retrieved August 31, 2013. Anne Applebaum jest już pełnoprawną Polką.By the summer of 1954, the unprofitability of the camps was widely recognized. Another survey of the Gulag's finances, carried out in June 1954, had again shown that they were heavily subsidized, and that the costs of guards in particular made them unprofitable. [15] [...] The incentive to change was now overwhelming—and change came. [4] National Book Award (Nonfiction), finalist, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956 [84]