Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps

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National Book Award (Nonfiction), finalist, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956 [84]

Anne Applebaum. Żona Radosława Sikorskiego to dziś jedna z najbardziej wpływowych Polek". Portal I.pl. Times of Polska. August 31, 2013 . Retrieved August 31, 2013. Anne Applebaum jest już pełnoprawną Polką. A book whose importance is impossible to exaggerate. . . . Magisterial . . . Applebaum’s book, written with such quiet elegance and moral seriousness, is a major contribution to curing the amnesia that curiously seems to have affected broader public perceptions of one of the two or three major enormities of the twentieth century.”– Times Literary SupplementAbout IWPR | Institute for War and Peace Reporting". December 6, 2014. Archived from the original on December 6, 2014 . Retrieved January 17, 2020. What this means is that although the official numbers of prisoners who died are lower than might have been expected–they peaked at 25 percent of the 1.7 million camp population in 1942, and, if they are to be believed, normally hovered around 3 to 5 percent–the number of Soviet citizens with some experience of labor camps is significantly higher. Adding up the totals for all of the years between 1930 and 1953, and factoring in the turnover, it is safe to say that some 18 million Soviet citizens had experience of camps, and perhaps another 15 million had experience of some other form of forced labor.9 Yet even these estimates include neither those shot before they made it to the camps nor the plight of families left behind. Wives of prisoners lost their jobs; children were forced into orphanages which were hardly more than breeding grounds for epidemics. Many died as a result, but how many? Bare statistics also mask other, more interesting facts, most notably the startlingly high rate of turnover. In 1943, for example, 2,421,000 prisoners passed through the Gulag system, although the totals at the beginning and end of that year show a decline from 1.5 to 1.2 million. Prisoners dropped off the rolls because they died, because they escaped (more often than is usually realized), because they had short sentences, because they were being released into the Red Army, or because they had been promoted to guard or administrator. Contrary to popular belief, it was only in the 1940s that the Gulag then became, in the words of the Spravochnik’s authors, a fully fledged “camp-industrial complex,” an integral and important part of the Soviet economy: the camps reached their peak in industrial might not, as is usually assumed, in 1937-1938 but in 1950-1952. How fully integrated and how important they were is still the subject of debate between those who think prisoner labor was essential to the Soviet economy and those who think prisoner labor was a vast money-squandering and time-wasting distraction. In the former category are many of the Gulag’s former bosses, who argued (and argue) that certain kinds of tasks could only have been completed at the required speed using prisoners. Alexei Loginov, former deputy commander of the Norilsk camps, gave a typical justification in an interview with Angus Macqueen for his documentary film GULAG, shown in July 1999 on BBC2. Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic and Gabriel Escobar of The Philadelphia Inquirer Join Pulitzer Board". The Pulitzer Prizes. December 13, 2021 . Retrieved May 4, 2022.

Dozens of regional historians have also made use of provincial archives to describe the history of particular camps, unfortunately often without footnotes or bibliographies. N.A. Morozov’s Gulag v Komi Krai (The Gulag in the Komi Region), Vasily Makurov’s Gulag v Karelii (The Gulag in Karelia), and Viktor Berdinskikh’s Vyatlag (describing the Vyatskii camps in northern Russia) are perhaps the three most professional. Also among the better books in this genre is S.P. Kuchin’s Polyansky ITL (Corrective Labor Camp)–although it is one (there are others) in which the author tries to defend the Gulag’s legacy. Thanks to the work of these and other writers, we can now see that Feliks Dzerzinsky, Lenin’s chief of secret police, was mulling over a plan to use prisoners to exploit the Soviet Union’s empty, mineral-rich far north as early as 1925; that the early camps in the Solovetsky Islands, run by the OGPU (then the name for the secret police), were the first to try to make prisoner labor profitable; and how the OGPU–with Stalin’s full support–then wrested the entire prison system away from the justice and interior ministries in a series of institutional battles by the end of the 1920s. a b " 'The Known World' Wins Pulitzer Prize for Fiction". The New York Times. April 5, 2004 . Retrieved March 2, 2020. Applebaum was born in Washington, D.C. [2] Applebaum has stated that she was brought up in a "very reform" Jewish family. [9] Her ancestors came to America from what is now Belarus. [10] She graduated from the Sidwell Friends School in 1982. Applebaum earned a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, in history and literature from Yale University, [11] where she attended the Soviet history course taught by Wolfgang Leonhard in fall 1982. [12] National Book Awards Winners and Finalists, The National Book Foundation". Nationalbook.org . Retrieved April 3, 2017. Applebaum is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. [70] She is on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy and Renew Democracy Initiative. [71] [72] She was a member of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting's international board of directors. [73] She was a Senior Adjunct Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) where she co-led a major initiative aimed at countering Russian disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). [74] She was on the editorial board for The American Interest [75] and the Journal of Democracy. [76] [ when?] Personal life [ edit ]Long, Karen R. (November 10, 2012). "Anne Applebaum's new investigative history, 'Iron Curtain,' is essential reading". The Plain Dealer . Retrieved August 30, 2017. Bihun, Yaro (November 10, 2017). "Anne Applebaum honored with Antonovych Award". The Ukrainian Weekly . Retrieved January 1, 2022.

Cassidy, Alan; Loser, Philipp (December 27, 2016). "Ähnlich wie in den 1930er-Jahren". Tages-Anzeiger (in German). ISSN 1422-9994 . Retrieved April 3, 2017. Craveri, Marta (January–June 1955). "Krizis ékonomiki MVD (Konets 1940-x-1950-e gody)". Cahiers du Monde Russe. xxxvi (1-2): 187. Press Release: Anne Applebaum's Red Famine Wins the 2018 Lionel Gelber Prize, CISION, March 13, 2018. Retrieved September 14, 2018. September 23, 2018). " "Беларусі трэба нацыяналізм". Ляўрэатка "Пулітцэра" пра радзіму прадзедаў і выхад з тупіку гісторыі". Радыё Свабода (in Belarusian) . Retrieved September 30, 2018.

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This book was not written ‘so that it will not happen again’, as the cliché would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people. Destruction of the ‘objective enemy’, as Hannah Arendt once put it, remains a fundamental object of many dictatorships. We need to know why—and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, a part of the explanation. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are. [4] She has been a member of The Washington Post editorial board. [5] She was a columnist at The Washington Post for seventeen years. [23] Applebaum was an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. [24] Applebaum, Anne (2012). Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956. New York USA: Doubleday. p.282,508. ISBN 9780385515696.

In 2014, writing in The New York Review of Books she asked (in a review of Karen Dawisha's Putin's Kleptocracy) whether "the most important story of the past twenty years might not, in fact, have been the failure of democracy, but the rise of a new form of Russian authoritarianism". [50] She has described the "myth of Russian humiliation" and argued that NATO and EU expansion have been a "phenomenal success". [51] In July 2016, before the US election, she wrote about connections between Donald Trump and Russia [52] and wrote that Russian support for Trump was part of a wider Russian political campaign designed to destabilize the West. [53] In December 2019, she wrote in The Atlantic that "in the 21st century, we must also contend with a new phenomenon: right-wing intellectuals, now deeply critical of their own societies, who have begun paying court to right-wing dictators who dislike America." [54] Central Europe [ edit ]

Anne Applebaum". Contemporary Authors Online (updated November 30, 2005.ed.). Farmington Hills, Michigan: Gale. 2008 [2006]. H1000119613. Archived from the original on January 12, 2001 . Retrieved April 14, 2009. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Yet although it was, at the time, taken as axiomatic that prison labor was cheaper–in 1935, Genrikh Yagoda, then chief of the OGPU, wrote a letter to Stalin promising that every kilometer of road built by prisoners would be 50,000 rubles cheaper–the consensus among the new generation of Russian historians is that the camp system was in fact an inefficient diversion of the country’s resources, which permanently damaged its economic development. In Labor Camp Socialism, Galina Ivanova points out that the economic activity of the secret police was, by the late 1940s, “so irrational and inefficient that even such a potentially lucrative form of commercial activity as ‘renting out workers’ did not bring the ministry any profit.” Oleg Khlevniuk, who is currently compiling a collection of Gulag documents for Yale University Press, also notes that in calculating the Gulag’s efficiency, the system’s masters failed to count the costs of the repressive system, including the costs of the guards, of the deaths, and most of all of the misdirected talent.8 How did it serve the country to have brilliant physicists (not all of them made it into Beria’s “Special Technical Bureaus”) digging coal? After spending years cultivating public apathy, the Russian president found his people indifferent to his fate. In its demography, in its slovenly working practices, in its criminally stupid bureaucracy, and in its sullen disregard for human life, it is beginning to look, rather, like a microcosm of the Soviet Union itself. Which is fitting, for that is what its prisoners always knew it to be: in prison camp slang, the world outside the barbed wire was not referred to as “freedom,” but as the bolshaya zona, the “big prison zone,” larger and less deadly than the “small zone” of the camp, but no more human, and certainly no more humane, nonetheless. Applebaum, Anne (March 4, 2016). "Is this the end of the West as we know it?". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286 . Retrieved April 3, 2017.