By Dan Dickinson
Review of:
Gulag by Anne Applebaum
Doubleday, New York 586 pages, $35.00

For at least the last twenty years, there's been a flurry of books, films, and exhibitions about the holocaust, many of them both profound and profoundly moving. Since the holocaust is a particularly singular and horrible chapter in the book of man's inhumanity to man, that's as it should be.

Much less remarked upon, though, is that other human catastrophe of man's calamitous twentieth century - those massacres perpetrated for the sake of the Marxist vision of a godless, perfect world. From China, to Cuba, to the Soviet Union, tens of millions suffered disease, destitution and death to build a perfect society on Earth. And while there have been a few good books on this topic by such writers an Solzhenitsyn, Conquest, and Orwell, and a mere handful of movies, the response to these atrocities has been, thus far, muted.

In Gulag, journalist Anne Applebaum provides a timely corrective to the world's collective memory lapse. A history of the Soviet system of concentration camps, Applebaum's book is a thoroughly researched, balanced, horrifying, and intensely affecting tale of what men and women will do to each other (in the words of one camp motto) "All for the Greater Good."

Just how big were the camps? How many people passed through them? According to Applebaum's research, there were some 476 camps, spread out across the Soviet Union. Altogether, some 18,000,000 Russians, Ukranians, Estonians, and a host of others - including more than a handful of Americans - passed into this Soviet shadow world. While the camps existed, unlike those in Hitler's Germany, to provide cheap labour rather than quick death, many of those who entered Gulag never left it. A combination of incompetence, gratuitous cruelty, executions, and deliberate starvation resulted in millions of deaths. During World War II, for example, one out of four prisoners died in captivity.

In the public mind, the camps are mostly closely associated with the Stalin regime. Applebaum gives the lie to that idea. "Gulag," she reports, "started at the beginning, and was always an integral part of Soviet life." Anne relates how Lenin, living in exile in Switzerland, had once savagely attacked the Mensheviks, a rival communist party. A friend said, "Vladimir Ilyich, if you come to power, you'll start hanging the Mensheviks!" Lenin retorted that he'd hang the Social Revolutionaries first, then the Mensheviks. Upon becoming dictator, Lenin did exactly that, eliminating any and all threats to his rule. Gulag was up and functioning within a year of the Bolshevik revolution.