The World of the Gulag.(Gulag: A History)(Book Review)

During a couple of tours as a correspondent in Russia and Germany, I was struck by a remarkable contrast. Visitors to Moscow are happy to snap up memorabilia featuring hammer-and-sickle emblems and images of Lenin and Stalin, but visitors to Berlin wouldn't dream of buying swastika trinkets or Hitler portraits--even if they were on offer, which they aren't. "While the symbol of one mass murder fills us with horror, the symbol of another mass murder makes us laugh," writes Anne Applebaum, now a Washington Post columnist. Her 677-page book "Gulag: A History" (Doubleday) should stop the laughter. It should also immediately claim its rightful place as the most authoritative--and comprehensive--account of the Soviet concentration-camp system ever published by a Western writer.

The explosive growth of that network of camps has been chronicled before, most memorably by former zeks, or prisoners, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniya Ginzburg and Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski. Western scholars like Robert Conquest have also contributed a rich body of literature on the subject. But in the West, the Soviet camp system has never haunted the popular imagination like the Nazi version has. By writing a vivid, detailed history for a general audience, Applebaum has clearly set out to change what she sees as a fundamental misperception of many outsiders to this day: that the Soviet experience was a noble experiment gone awry rather than a system based on murder and destruction from day one.

While the Gulag is most closely associated with Stalin, it was started under Lenin right after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. As part of Lenin's Red Terror, "special camps" were quickly established. In theory, what came to be known as the Gulag was a system of forced labor rather than a death machine. But of the 18 million people who passed through between 1929 and 1953, Applebaum points to a death count of almost 3 million. And this is far from a complete tabulation. It doesn't include those who perished in the early or late years of the system, which outlived Stalin's death in 1953 and continued, albeit with smaller numbers of political prisoners, until 1986. It also ...