Reviewing Gulag (February 2026)

In 2004, in the midst of America’s War on Terror, Anne Applebaum’s Gulag won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. This was nearly forgotten history, everything now being relative to the Middle East and, in particular, al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Applebaum, a journalist and public historian, sneaked out a win with a history from the coldest, darkest days of the Cold War—quite remarkable since Stalin and his Gulag and Soviet dissidents like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov were no longer news, and Alexei Navalny hadn’t yet become known to America. By the turn of the century, the U.S.S.R. and Soviet Communism had decisively collapsed, and America had emerged by default as the solitary superpower.

For a short while, it did seem like the ‘end of history,’ with American democracy having surpassed or outlasted all rival political systems. For many, including this reviewer, the unimaginable end of the Cold War did arrive in their lifetimes. However, after a devastating attack on its homeland, America had found a new formidable enemy in political Islam. A new global war had to be fought. This is what Applebaum was up against with her 2003 Gulag. Looking back though, her book is not as irrelevant as one might think. In fact, she closes the book with these words: “This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again.” “It” refers to “our ability to debase and destroy and dehumanize our fellow men,” as during the 20^th century tragedies of “the Gulag, the Holocaust, the Armenian massacre, the Nanking massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian revolution, the Bosnian wars, among many others.”

Reading this book a generation after its publication provides readers with an opportunity to revisit her warning. In 2024, she wrote Autocracy, Inc. in which she identifies a new global power struggle between liberal democracies and illiberal as well as totalitarian political systems, Hungary being an example of an illiberal democracy and China an example of a present-day totalitarian regime. During the early part of the 21^st century, talk of “the end of history” has been replaced by cautions that the death of liberal democracy is imminent. Applebaum, a vocal critic of U.S. President Trump and his vision for a new America, sees America careening towards the authoritarianism of its former enemies, Nazi Germany and the Stalinist U.S.S.R. Reading Gulag now gives the reader the benefit of hindsight to look for similarities between today’s America and the evil genius driving the U.S.S.R during its murderous heyday.

In choosing to write about Stalin’s Gulag, Applebaum implies that one of her purposes in choosing this subject is to raise (or reawaken) a general awareness of Stalin’s evil. In her Introduction she writes that “to many people, the crimes of Stalin do not inspire the same visceral reaction as do the crimes of Hitler.” Her objective is not so much to paint Stalin to be Hitler’s equal in depravity and wickedness but to remind readers that what he did during his reign of terror must be remembered so that its recurrence, in whatever form, will not go unchallenged. Provoking a visceral response from the reader also seems to be part of what she had in mind.

Applebaum’s previous histories of Russia/U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe have been part of her effort to keep memories of 20^th century horrors alive by revisiting state records and survivor stories. Her history of the Gulag is addressed to both past and new readers of Soviet history, and it is therefore a warning against forgetfulness and ignorance. Unbeknownst to Applebaum at the time, it also puts readers on high alert regarding the sort of state-managed amnesia one sees in Trump’s America, e.g., with respect to the rewriting of Black American history—downplaying 400 years of slavery, the Civil Rights movement and ongoing anti-black racism.

Applebaum’s history is a history of the Gulag (more familiar to readers of Solzhenitsyn as the Gulag Archipelago), the system of prison camps in the Soviet Union for both criminals (thieves, rapists, murderers, etc.) and political prisoners (opposition party members, critics of Stalin and the U.S.S.R. and other such enemies of the people) spread across the gigantic Soviet Empire from the Baltic to the Pacific. More than half of her book is devoted to descriptions of life in the camps, and she focuses most on those in Northeastern Europe and Siberia—places nearly impossible for human habitation, places like the Vorkuta coal basin, the Norilsk nickel mines and the Kolyma gold mines.

Among Soviet historians, there are debates about the extent to which the Stalin’s Gulag was promoted chiefly to eliminate Stalin’s opponents or to create a system of ‘slave labourers’ to settle the empty north. For Applebaum, it doesn’t really matter as both were driving factors. She writes that Stalin's "obsessive interest in vast construction projects" and his “new program of extremely—almost hysterically—rapid industrialization" provided the camps with a strong economic rationale, whereas his use of slave labour for public works follows the precedent of Peter the Great, the famed architect (and forgotten enslaver) of the grandeur of St. Petersburg.

Applebaum’s work is based on state records that haven’t been destroyed and have been made available, but there remain large gaps in the history of the U.S.S.R. Unlike Germany, the U.S.S.R. was not conquered by foreign armies already mapping out war crimes charges, so for Russia, the excavation and preservation of secret state documents never acquired the same level of attention and urgency. Thus, former inmate memoirs are a primary source of information about the prison camps and they occupy a substantial portion of the book.(1)

The most compelling portion of the book is also the most uncomfortable to read. As I was reading, I marked chapters 7 (Arrest), 8 (Prison) and 9 (Transport) as being replete with singularly horrific accounts. This was the beginning of Applebaum’s condensed history of the Soviet Gulag. It started with the arrest. In responding to her interlocutor’s often-asked question, “What for?,” Nadezhda Mandelstam answers, “What do you mean what for? It’s time you understood that people are arrested for nothing!” Prison and transport were intermediate stages. The camps were the final destination, literally in the cases of millions. For what it is worth, Stalin’s Gulag was not comprised of death camps on the scale of Nazi Germany’s.(2) Stalin wanted his prisoners alive to work themselves to death, after which point replacements would be requisitioned. Nina Gagen-Torn, writing about the exceeding slow conveyance of prisoners by train—in cattle trains not passenger trains—to faraway places, speaks of the indifference of the guards on the train: “They didn’t look at us as people. We were living cargo.” And once in the camps, the prisoners were truly inanimate factors of production, which like machines wear out and have to be replaced—just entries to be recorded in the accounting ledgers.

While the camps were not death camps, they were concentration camps, and across the vast U.S.S.R., the camp regimen focused on dehumanizing and controlling the person: designating where he could and could not go (e.g., to ensure he didn’t get shot in the ‘death zone’ by the guards in the watchtowers); dictating the times and durations for sleeping, working, bathing, eating and counting (prisoners were routinely counted multiple times in subzero temperatures while standing still for however long it took); and compelling him to work to the norms in backbreaking manual labour, where meeting the norm meant the difference between getting prison bread and cabbage soup or nothing at all.

Evgeniya Ginzburg, an intellectual and thus a political, writes of the boat trip along the Pacific Coast to Kolyma, where she first became acquainted with the criminal prisoners:

They were the cream of the criminal world: murderers, sadists, adept at every kind of sexual perversion . . . without wasting any time they set about terrorizing and bullying the “ladies,” delighted to find that “enemies of the people” were creatures even more despised and outcast than themselves . . . They seized our bits of bread, snatched the last of our rags with our bundles, pushed us out of the places we had managed to find.

Vardam Shalamov writes of how quickly the human (machine) parts wore down:

In order for a healthy young man, beginning his career at the gold-face in the clean, cold air, to turn into a “goner,” he needed only a period of twenty to thirty days of sixteen-hour workdays, without days off, coupled with systematic starvation, tattered clothes, nights in 60 degrees below zero of cold in a canvas tent full of holes.

Gustav Herling writes of what it means to learn to live “without pity:”

At first he shares his bread with hunger-demented prisoners, leads the night-blind[3] on the way home from work, shouts for help when his neighbor in the forest has chopped off two fingers, and surreptitiously carries cans of soup and herring-heads to the mortuary.[4] After several weeks he realizes that his motives in all this are neither pure nor really disinterested, that he is following the egotistic injunctions of his brain and saving first of all himself. The camp, where prisoners live at the lowest level of humanity and follow their own brutal code of behavior toward others . . . How could he have supposed, back in prison, that a man can be so degraded as to arouse not compassion but only loathing and repugnance in his fellow prisoners?

In a brutally frank assessment of whether prisoners conducted themselves with unblemished humanity, Shalamov shoos away any praise for his having survived the camps and confesses (more than most of us would dare): “The camp was a great test of our moral strength, of our everyday morality, and 99 percent of us failed it.”

It wasn’t just the guards who tortured the prisoners. The camps were mixed with hard-core criminals as well as politicals, and the two did not mix well. There was, of course, murder, usually of politicals by criminals. And there was sexual violence even though men and women were supposed to be segregated. Herling describing a gang rape, writes that the victim “let out a short, throaty cry, full of tears and muffled by her skirt. A sleepy voice called from the watch-tower: ‘Come, come boys, what are you doing? Have you no shame?’ The eight men pulled the girl behind the latrines, and continued . . .”

And Herling again, writing of the anonymity of so much death and so many corpses that in winter the bodies had to be stacked like logs until the spring thaws opened the earth to receive the dead,

We had no idea where the dead were buried, or whether, after a prisoner’s death, any kind of death certificate was ever written . . . The certainty that no one would ever learn of their death, that no one would ever know where they had been buried, was one of the prisoners’ greatest psychological torments

And Ginzburg whose prison career included cutting down trees in the Siberian north before luckily getting work in a camp nursery. But what she witnessed there was the psychological horror of seeing children born to camp prisoners who had been so badly treated that many had not even learned to speak:

Only certain of the four-year-olds could produce a few odd, unconnected words. Inarticulate howls, mimicry and blows were the main means of communication. “How can they be expected to speak? Who was there to teach them?” explained Anya [a co-worker] dispassionately. “In the infants’ group they spend their whole time just lying on their cots. Nobody will pick them up, even if they cry their lungs out. It’s not allowed, except to change wet diapers—when there are dry ones available, of course.”

And here Applebaum’s closing words demand our attention: “it almost certainly will happen again.”

_____

Endnotes

Shalamov’s experience in the camps was longer and more bitter than my own, and I respectfully confess that to him and not me was it given to touch those depths of bestiality and despair toward which life in the camps dragged us all.”

According to Applebaum, the three northern mining camps of Vorkuta (coal), Norilsk (nickel) and Kolyma (gold) were the harshest.