Anne Appelbaum, GULAG: A History

A few of us will some day read Solzhenitsyn's magnum opus of Soviet forced labor camps, Gulag Archipelago. For the rest, there is Anne Appelbaum's GULAG: A History (Doubleday, 2003). The word "Gulag" has come to be synonymous with the camp system itself, and is even frequently misused to mean an individual camp, but is in fact an abbreviation for "Central Administration of Camps," the Soviet bureaucracy that ran the system. Though the KGB, and its predecessors OGPU and NKVD, have frequently vied for control of the camps with the Interior Ministry, the KGB won, as it did in most aspects of Soviet life, and in light of the fact that the KGB's archives were the only ones that were not opened to researchers after 1991, Appelbaum's study is as comprehensive and precise as we can hope to find until that situation changes.

Those who have no meaningful knowledge of Soviet camps will find more than they will have bargained for. It's all here - the unbearable weather of Russia's Arctic regions, appalling sanitation, starvation rations, inhumane working hours, and beyond-cruel punishments for the slightest disciplinary infractions. She does not skimp on details, some of which may come as a surprise even to those who think themselves knowledgeable. Prisoners on the verge of starvation who spend the last days of their lives crawling around garbage dumps in search of scarps. Women gang-raped literally to death on the transport ships plying the waters of the Russian Far East. It goes on.

The value of Appelbaum's research and writing, though, extends far beyond these topics, as valuable as they are. She masterfully analyzes the complex social structure of the camps - the informers, the bribery, the gangs and the rivalries among prisoners. What will no doubt come as a shock to many Western readers is the revelation that the line separating the guards from the guarded could, and frequently did, blur. Prisoners became guards with regularity, often going directly from one status to the other.

In the West, more often than not Soviet camps are mentioned in the same breath as political prisoners, so I am particularly grateful to Appelbaum for the attention she pays to the professional criminals that have always, even in the darkest days of political repression, constituted the majority of the camps' population. The Soviet Union having been a society under which the most minute aspects of an individual's life were controlled by the government, many readers do not realize that the country has always, even under Stalin, had a large class of full-time criminals, complete with its own code of ethics, distinctive style of dress and, famously, a patois that at times barely sounded like mainstream Russian. As a primer on this underworld, one could do a lot worse than Appelbaum's book.

Nor does she skimp on the government's administration of the camps and the dismal failures that usually accompanied it. From its inception in 1926, GULAG was always intended to be a bulwark of Stalin's economic policy, but in fact had not had a single profitable year in all of its existence. That does not surprise us today, of course, but what might is her revelation that also throughout its existence, the system was plagued with intense conflict between the central administrators in Moscow and the local commanders at the individual camps. The local bosses, expected to fulfill completely unreasonable production norms, and occasionally, Appelbaum is careful to note, out of genuine desire to improve their prisoners' lot, constantly harped on the bureaucrats for woefully inadequate supplies, lack of support, and the general fact that the bureaucrats simply did not get it.

Appelbaum's writing style is perfect for the topic. She is direct, clear, and most importantly, completely unsentimental. This is a documentary work based on research, and the lack of fuzzy, emotional language in no way diminishes its power or makes us appreciate the plight of the tens of millions of GULAG's victims any less. And her research is impressive to say the least. Communist apologists will no doubt find fault with it, citing, among other things, her reliance on the writing of Varlam Shalamov, who, while a survivor of the camps, has only published camp-themed fiction. But that's just squeaking of a discontented few. Remove Shalamov completely, and the book will lose no more than a few pages and none of its power.

In the closing chapters, Appelbaum does offer some thoughts on why the history of the camps has not played nearly as prominent a role in Russia's social and political discourse after 1991 as many have expected. More significantly, she takes a few pages to lament the West's relative indifference to what we can reasonably view as the largest case of mass murder, if not genocide, in history. Yes, nothing Appelbaum says in conclusion is different from Santayana's "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it," but of countless things we, as a civilization, would never want to repeat, the GULAG is right at the top, and in English at least, it has no better chronicler than Anne Appelbaum.