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Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps
At least, that was the imbecilic justification that different Soviet leaders gave. Lenin to Stalin to Khrushchev, right down to Yuri Andropov and Gorbachev, the leaders of the Soviet Union claimed that they knew the path of history better than anyone else. Such Pashas of history, those who make strong claims that they know whither history is headed and try to force the pace of historical change, often bring untold misery on everyone else. Much of the claim remains foolish and turns out to be hypothetical. Only the misery remains real. It is this misery that has been documented in extraordinary detail and with great sympathy by Applebaum. It is a great corrective to those who still lament the disappearance of the USSR and its free educational and health care services for the 245 million people of the Soviet lands. Those free services came at the cost of over 45 million people who had to suffer extreme degradation, deprivation, torture, rape and death at the hands of the Gulag administration. Even Hitler was stopped in his tracks, but not the Soviet leadership. The existence of the prison camps was coeval with the formation of the RSFSR (Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic). In 1922, a total of 15 Soviet republics were brought together under the rubric of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. In 1923, the first camp of the Gulag was set up at the Solovetsky monastery in northern Russia. By 1929, when Stalin assumed power, these camps were charged with providing forced labour for the Soviet economic expansion. At any given time, one to three million people were in the labour camps. Many more, like the Chechens, Poles, Finns and Balts were being forcibly moved out of their homes in the Soviet version of ethnic cleansing. Stealing a pencil from the office, cracking a joke about the Soviet system, praying to God, being reported upon by a neighbour as anti-Soviet, becoming a prisoner of war or writing a poem whilst one had not been designated a poet by the local administration could get you a sentence in the labour camps. These camps had been set up with the idiotic idea that forced manual labour by untrained people would be able to complete the ill-designed engineering projects of the Soviet government. Most of these projects served no purpose other than wasting money and life. It was a rare ship that could pass through the White Sea Canal since that waterway constructed by forced labour was originally only 12 feet deep, too shallow for any ocean going vessel to bring its cargo inland. Similar was the case with the numerous railway lines, roads and forestry projects completed by the Gulag. Even after the Soviet administration realised that the Gulag was a major drain on the economy, it continued with it since the very presence of the Gulag served to terrorise everyone into acceptance of the idiocies and corruption that marked the Soviet government. Finally, it was the demise of the USSR that freed the people from the labour camps. I would strongly recommend this excellent book. |
Journalists
merrily go into territory where historians fear to tread. Their daring
often results in books of the sort that Anne Applebaum has written.
Readable, informative and moralistic, it recounts the history of the
Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei or the GULAG, the Main Camp Administration.
This was the department set up in Soviet Russia to deal with those who
created obstacles on the historical path destined for the Soviet Union.