Dreary, Graphic, and absolutely Essential

Review of Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum

Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was a transcendent reading experience for me in youth, a polemical oral history of human suffering and cruelty on an unimaginable scale. For weeks, I was utterly transfixed by it. Beyond the geopolitics I discovered, it changed my life, to focus on the essentials rather than career or material gain. Even though I remain an atheist, Solzhenitsyn’s scene of religious conversion was one of the most moving passages I have ever read.

Applebaum’s book, I hoped, would put Solzhenitsyn in historical perspective and reassess his achievement in light of developments over the last 50 years. Happily, she succeeds at this in a book that is a perfect balance of journalism and scholarship at high academic standard. If the subject is horrific and depressing, her treatment is even-handed and as objective as is possible. I think that any student of history or current affairs should read this.

Though there were antecedents of forced exile and labor in Tsarist Russia, Applebaum says, the establishment of concentration camps to serve and enrich the state (the gulag) represents a new development, particularly in light of the scale it later reached. Before entry into the gulag, prisoners were systematically tortured in overcrowded, makeshift prisons in the hopes of confessions and the recruitment of informers.

Starting out ad hoc, as a way to isolate and exploit political prisoners in the aftermath of Lenin’s coup, a number of initial camps were set up in Solovetsky Monastery and on the other islands nearby. Prisoners’ treatment depended largely upon who was running their camp: some were relaxed and open, others brutally cruel to the point of murder. During the civil war, rations were kept to such a minimum that up to 25% of prisoners died of starvation or its complications; also, their clothing and all facilities were fatally inadequate.

It was not until Naftaly Frenkel was put in charge that an attempt to instill systematic order was undertaken. Frenkel, once a prisoner himself, had presented a plan to Stalin, who was keen to put the prisoners to use as slave labor in the grand projects he was inaugurating as supreme leader. This system was called “katorga” (galley in medieval Greek) and the prisoners were “zeks”. Without tools and little planning, they were put to work, often digging with their hands or homemade tools of wood and iron. Frenkel instituted a brutal policy of feeding only those who worked, ensuring that the weak would die off.

Stalin got the propaganda victories he hoped for – the authorities could claim they were rehabilitating the zeks and that their big-project accomplishments were without peer in history. Maxim Gorky wrote ridiculously mendacious accounts of what was happening, which intellectuals and activists in the west proved eager to believe through the 1930s. Of course, when you look into the details as Applebaum does through comprehensive documentary research and vivid eyewitness interviews, a very different story emerges.  Not only were many of the projects virtually worthless, resulting in under-used roads and unpassable canals, but the human cost was catastrophic. Clearly, it was only Stalin’s obsession with katorga that perpetuated such an unprofitable and wasteful system. Tens of millions of citizens were processed through the gulag, which Solzhenitsyn described as a “zek nation”.

The first third of the book is about the establishment of the system. The middle section is about life in the camps, which will shock and horrify as the stories should. Essentially, zeks were common criminals, peasants, and, of course, presumed opponents to the Soviet regime. As there was no due process, anyone could be arrested and sent into the system, be it for activism, a vindictive neighbor, the wrong appearance or demeanor (as judged by apparatchiks without clear criteria), even for no reason other than terror. Sentences often ran to decades, tearing apart families and exposing those left behind to ostracism and poverty; upon release, many were expected to stay in Siberia. In a way, it was like the excesses of the terminal phase of the French Revolution under Robespierre, only with industrial means and a plan for long-term slavery.

The criminals often ran the camps through violence and rape. Solzhenitsyn tells many stories of their cruelties, which often were ignored or abetted by authorities who were equally inhuman. Anyone who opposed them risked murder or mutilation. The katorga was organized into work teams under a foreman who literally held the lives of his charges in his hand; a humane one could save lives and give some comfort, but many evil ones served as well. Notably, Applebaum covers sex in the camps in far greater detail than Solzhenitsyn.

Applebaum covers the zeks’ strategies of survival, which included concubinage, collaboration with authorities, getting on lighter work details and similar measures. I wonder what I would have done in such a situation. Over time, Applebaum informs us, conditions improved somewhat with greater rations, less brutal work, and the like. When Lavrenty Beria (deputy premier and head of security) took over, he worked to streamline the system and came to know it intimately.

The last third of the book is about the gulag’s apogee and decline after Stalin’s death in 1953. Towards the end, it was clear that the system produced far less at greater cost than would free labor, which everyone but Stalin seemed to know. Beria attempted to reform the system in 1953, but seems to have proceeded so quickly that his enemies ousted him, leaving an opening for Nikita Khrushchev to take over in 1953 as First Secretary of the Communist Party. In 1956, Khrushchev secretly denounced Stalin in closed session for his excesses and atrocities, including the creation of the gulag system. Mass amnesties soon began, though they were carried out in typically uneven and chaotic fashion, leaving many to languish for years.

In some of the most interesting chapters, Applebaum addresses the human toll of the gulag, not just to broken families and deaths, but in the individual psychology of the zeks; many were so traumatized that they lost all human emotion. Truly, Russia is a deeply wounded nation, not just due to the war but because of misguided policies. 

Applebaum’s wonderful writing pulled me into the book. It is such an awful story that I am in awe of her persistence in researching and telling it. Not many would have the stomach for it and it is a great contribution, completely complementary with Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece.