Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps

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Anne, who received the Pulitzer Prize for Gulag, has made one of her professional preoccupations (to borrow from Robert Burns) man’s inhumanity to man—­specifically, though not exclusively, the in­humanity manifest in Soviet and post-Soviet history. Her book Red Famine is the definitive study of Stalin’s calculated starvation of Ukraine. Anne’s work on that catastrophe prepared her to write about Ukraine’s latest calamity, a calamity whose author is Stalin’s worthy successor. Readers of The Atlantic have benefited from Anne’s erudition, vision, and trenchant writing. a b " 'The Known World' Wins Pulitzer Prize for Fiction". The New York Times. April 5, 2004 . Retrieved March 2, 2020. Yet what did he intend for the camp inmates? A strength of the book is the author's insistence that conditions in the camp were meant to be severe but bearable. Only in the second world war, when malnutrition afflicted most people in the USSR, were the rations lowered below those levels. The problem was that the NKVD was corrupt and the food supplies and medicines assigned to the gulag were siphoned off at each stage of delivery to the camps. The consequent need arose for serial replenishment of convicts.

Londoner's Diary: Love's Legatum Lost in battle over Brexit". Evening Standard. December 8, 2016 . Retrieved April 17, 2017. Merritt Miner, Steven (May 11, 2003). "The Other Killing Machine". The New York Times . Retrieved May 5, 2022. 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] 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. In October 2017, she published her third history book, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, a history of the Holodomor. The book won the Lionel Gelber Prize [37] and the Duff Cooper Prize [38] for the second time, making her the only author to ever win the award twice. [39]

Monumental . . . Applebaum uses her own formidable reporting skills to construct a gripping narrative.”– Newsday 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 Elizabeth Applebaum [2] [3] (born July 25, 1964) is an American and naturalized-Polish journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. Trump: An American Tragedy?: Intelligence Squared". intelligencesquared.com. Archived from the original on April 29, 2017 . Retrieved April 17, 2017. Alexander Solzhenitsyn arrives in Zurich after being deprived of his Soviet citizenship following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

Ivan Krastev (August 15, 2020). "The Tragic Romance of the Nostalgic Western Liberal". Foreign Policy . Retrieved November 15, 2022. On Nov. 10, 1989, Applebaum, then a young reporter, jumped in a car in the company of her soon-to-be husband—future Polish Foreign and Defense Minister Radek Sikorski—and drove from Warsaw to Berlin to see with her own eyes the collapse of the Berlin Wall. 1989 was the point of departure of everything that Applebaum did in the following three decades. Her much-praised history books about the Soviet Gulag and the establishment of the communist regimes in Central Europe were her historical introduction to the inevitability of 1989. Aussie takes top British literary prize". The Sydney Morning Herald. June 17, 2004 . Retrieved May 14, 2022. Freeman, Jay (March 15, 2003). "* Applebaum, Anne. Gulag". Booklist. American Library Association. 99 (14). Applebaum, Anne (March 4, 2016). "Is this the end of the West as we know it?". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286 . Retrieved April 3, 2017.

Summary

The most authoritative—and comprehensive—account of this Soviet blight ever published by a Western writer.”— Newsweek

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. a b "Press Release: Anne Applebaum Joins The Atlantic as Staff Writer". The Atlantic. November 15, 2019 . Retrieved March 2, 2020.Petrone, Justine. "Interview with Anne Applebaum". City Paper. Baltic News Ltd. Archived from the original on July 20, 2011 . Retrieved October 3, 2009. 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

See, for example, Robert W. Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941 (Yale University Press, 1996).

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Applebaum, Anne (December 18, 2014). "How He and His Cronies Stole Russia". The New York Review of Books . Retrieved April 3, 2017. This book was not written ‘so that it will not happen again’, as the cliché would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people. Destruction of the ‘objective enemy’, as Hannah Arendt once put it, remains a fundamental object of many dictatorships. 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. [4] This film was the first in English to interview both prisoners and camp commanders. Excerpts from some of the interviews also appeared in an article by Angus Macqueen in Granta 64 (Winter 1998), pp. 37-53, under the title “Survivors.”