Capturing the apocalypse.(Gulag: A History)(Book Review)

Gulag: A History By Anne Applebaum Doubleday, 720 pages, $35

Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History is nothing short of a masterpiece. Relying on official archives, personal stories, accounts by inmates, and reports by those who visited or heard about the inferno known as the Soviet labor camps, she captures the full dimensions of their monstrosity with numbing precision. The simplicity of her style, devoid of any melodrama or hyperbole, allows the stark reality to emerge in its unadorned, terrifying horror.

The USSR exterminated millions of its own citizens slowly and unsystematically, although hundreds of thousands were also mass-murdered, execution-style. "In Auschwitz you could die in a gas chamber, in Kolyma you could freeze to death in the snow." Like the mythical Cronos, the Soviet Union devoured its own children. The millions of victims may not be regurgitated. But they can be remembered, and the crime exposed.

Her massive book covers the origins of the gulag in 1917, life and work in the camps, and their demise from 1940 to 1986. Hardly a mere aberration, the camps were the bloodiest aspect of a revolution that had turned a society's values upside down, as "murder became an accepted part of the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat." Imprisoning thousands for the crime of having accumulated some property was in line with official ideology. Soon, "enemies" could be found everywhere: in national groups that Stalin wanted to exterminate, or simply people whose enemies denounced them falsely.

From 1929 to 1953 alone, there were 476 camp complexes; each could contain hundreds of smaller units. Most were closed upon Stalin's death, but in the '70s and '80s, several were redesigned as prisons, to accommodate a new breed of democratic activists--anti-Soviet nationalists--as well as ordinary criminals. How many died? While easy to print numbers on a page, the scale of terror is as impossible to digest psychologically as the age of the universe, and no less apocalyptic. The often-quoted figure (including by Khruschev) of some 17 or 18 million killed from 1937 to 1953 is misleading, as it excludes the many hundreds of thousands sentenced to forced labor without incarceration; prisoners of war; captives in postwar "filtration camps" (where POWs who had already suffered torments in German camps were kept for further "questioning" that often lasted years); the "special exiles," which included kulaks deported during collectivization; Poles, Baits, Caucasians, Tartars; and countless others.

How does one ...