A review: Anne Applebaum, GULAG: A History. Doubleday, New York, 2003. ISBN 0-7679-0056-1, 677 pp.

Anne Applebaum is a columnist and member of the editorial board of the Washington Post. A graduate of Yale and a Marshall Scholar, she has worked as the foreign and deputy editor of the Spectator (London), as the Warsaw correspondent for the Economist, and as columnist for the on-line magazine Slate. Writes also for Wall Street Journal and Foreign Affairs.

This monumental, intriguing, well-researched, documented and well-written historical narrative is a major contribution to a rather indifferent knowledge in the West of the Soviet communist system, with particular reference to GULAG (<=I>=Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei<=I>= — Main Directorate for Corrective Labour Camps), balancing the far more publicized historical descriptions of the Nazi Germany system and its camps. Interest in the crimes of the Soviets in the west was fostered with the publication of Alexander Solzhenytsin’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch” (1962), and the “Gulag Archipelago” (1973). Solzhenytsin himself was a “graduate” of GULAG. Till then, western interest in this historical period was conspicuously non-existent.

The author explains this absence of popular feeling towards the tragedy of European communism as the logical result of a particular set of circumstances: a] the passage of time — communist regimes really did grow less reproachable as the years went by; b] the absence of hard information — archives were closed; access to camp sites forbidden; no filming of Soviet camps or their victims (as was done in Germany at the end of the Second World War. Thus, no images. The corollary: less understanding.) c] As well, the Soviet Union was on the winner’s side of the Second World War. (One should compare the general silence of the treatment of the losers, of the German war prisoners by the Allied forces, in the prison camps containing millions of war prisoners. James Bacque’s “Other losses” tells of inhumane treatment in the camps, lack of shelter and medical treatment, malnutrition, resulting in high mortality).

Against this background, the social, cultural and political framework for a knowledge of the GULAG has not been put in place. This book tries to fill in an historical void: history cannot be denied. Also, throughout the book there are references to Baltic prisoners, and incidents that took place with them.
The book has three main sections: I — The Origins of the GULAG, 1917-1939; II — Life and Work in the Camps; III — The Rise and Fall of the Camp-industrial Complex 1940-1946. Each section has topical sub-headings. The succinct Introduction and the Epilogue complement the above, making the whole account meaningful and understandable, in context of present day political perspectives. This is an eminently readable history.

The present review will present the conceptual highlights, and due to the nature of the topic, it cannot be cursory — it is a qualifed summary.

Introduction

This is an outline of the GULAG history, and comparative commentary of the nature of Soviet and German camps, dehumanization of prisoners being the main feature.

The GULAG had antecedents in Czarist Russia, in the form of forced labour brigades that operated in Siberia from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. The Russian revolution and the Soviet system “modernized” it: the goal was to speed up the Soviet Union’s industrialization and expansion during the Second World War. When Stalin died in 1953, some 18 million people had passed through the system. The system was redesigned to “use” the prisoners of the new generation: the democratic activists and anti-Soviet nationalists, as well as the ever-present criminals.

Comparing the Nazi and Soviet camps, “...there were differences in the organizations of daily life and work, different sort of guards and punishments, different kinds of propaganda. The GULAG lasted far longer and went through cycles of relative cruelty and relative humanity. The history of Nazi camps is shorter, and contains less variations; they simply became crueler and crueler, until the retreating Germans liquidated them or invading Allies liberated them.” “In Germany you would die of cruelty; in Russia you would die of despair”.

Part I — The Origins of GULAG 1917-1939

This consists of the following sections: 1. Bolshevik Beginnings; 2. The First Camp of the GULAG.; 3. 1929- The Great Turning Point; 4. The White Sea Canal; 5. The Camps Expand; 6. The Great Terror and Its Aftermath.

The Bolshevik beginning of the camp system commenced in 1917, after the power takeover, sentencing people for what they were, not for what they had done. The Bolsheviks’ concern was that they could hardly allow “real” enemies to enter the ordinary prison system. They thus created the Commissiariat of Justice, which ran the “regular” prison system, while the Cheka (Later, the GPU-OGPU-NKVD-KGB) controlled the political prison system. In 1919 there were 21 registered camps by the end of 1920’s, there were 107 such camps. And growing in numbers...

The “best” known camp, knowledge disseminated through the prisoners’ folklore, was on Solovetsky Island, in the White Sea, housed in an historical monastery. It was the first prison where the GPU learned how to use slave labour for profit, having 6,000 prisoners by 1925. This camp is also remembered for another reason. On that island, prisoners were subjected to the kind of sadism and torture of a sort not found with any frequency in the GULAG of later years, where “slave-driving had become a thought-out system” (Solzhenystin).

In 1929 Maxim Gorky visited Solovetsky Island and wrote an essay, which “...was to become an important foundation stone in the forming of both public and official attitudes to the new and far more extensive system of camps which were conceived in that same year”. Gorky made the institutionalized violence of the Solovetsky camp seem logical, and a natural part of the new order, and helped to reconcile the public to the growing, totalitarian power of the state. This turning point was accentuated and utilized by the new Soviet leader — Stalin, starting with a new “Five Year Plan”.

Of the Plan’s new projects, the “show” White Sea Canal, a project of folly and human cost, was the most important GULAG project of that era. Yet, the canal was not typical of the GULAG’s projects to follow, as the camps expanded. The nature of the OGPU changed too. Their role expanded, spying upon the enemies of the regime, interrogation of suspected dissidents, and ferreting out of “plots” and “conspiracies”. OGPU now shouldered part of the responsibility for the Soviet Union’s economic development and exploitation of the Soviet Union’s natural resources.

New camps were established. The vast region of the Komi Republic received a major share of prisoners, who built major cities and camps like Ukhta, Pechora, Kotlas, Vorkuta and Inta. Applebaum provides a detailed description of the travails of the prisoners entering the camps, then trying to stay alive there. Other camps were established at Magadan, Kolyma, Norilsk, Elgan, Uzbekistan and in Kazakhistan. Camps flourished. OGPU had become the most important economic actor in the country, renamed NKVD in 1934.

Where did the prisoners come from? In the years before the Great Terror (1937-1938), from 1918 on, there had been regular mass-arrests and deportations, first of opposition politicians at the beginning of 1920’s, then of “saboteurs” at the end of the 1920’s, then the kulaks in the early 1930’s.

1937 was a watershed year, during which the Soviet camps transformed themselves from indifferently run prisons in which people died by accident, into genuine death camps where prisoners were deliberately worked to death, or actually murdered, in far larger number than ever in the past.

The Great Terror left its mark on the mentality of camp guards and prisoners alike.

But the prisoners did not die only from starvation and overwork. In August, 1937, Yezhov signed an order calling for the execution of inmates being held in high-security prisons. 1200 were shot. This hysteria lasted until November 1938, when Lavrenti Beria replaced Yezhov. Beria immediately changed the regime in the camps, streamlined the procedures, all in order to put the camps back where Stalin wanted them: at the heart of the Soviet economy. There was no re-discovery of humanity, seeing prisoners as people.

Beria’s changes made an impact; NKVD’s economic activity began to grow; the number of prisoners grew to 1,800,000; the number of deaths reduced to 3% from 5%; the camps became larger: Dalstroi 200,000 prisoners, Norilsk 68,849 (1952).

By the end of the 1940’s, the Soviet concentration camps had attained their permanent form, penetrating nearly every region of the Soviet Union. And the camps evolved. They were no longer idiosyncratically run work-sites, but full-pledged camp-industrial complexes, with internal rules and habitual practices, distribution systems and hierarchies.

(to be continued)

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