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 …