The Gulag

728 Pages·2003·5.79 MB·English

by  Anne Applebaum

Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Praise
Introduction
PART ONE - THE ORIGINS OF THE GULAG, 1917—1939
Chapter 1 - BOLSHEVIK BEGINNINGS
Chapter 2 - “THE FIRST CAMP OF THE GULAG”
Chapter 3 - 1929: THE GREAT TURNING POINT
Chapter 4 - THE WHITE SEA CANAL
Chapter 5 - THE CAMPS EXPAND
Chapter 6 - THE GREAT TERROR AND ITS AFTERMATH
PART TWO - LIFE AND WORK IN THE CAMPS
Chapter 7 - ARREST
Chapter 8 - PRISON
Chapter 9 - TRANSPORT, ARRIVAL, SELECTION
Chapter 10 - LIFE IN THE CAMPS
ZONA: WITHIN THE BARBED WIRE
REZHIM: RULES FOR LIVING
BARAKI: LIVING SPACE
BANYA: THE BATHHOUSE
STOLOVAYA: THE DINING HALL
Chapter11 - WORK IN THE CAMPS
RABOCHAYA ZONA: THE WORK ZONE
KVCh: THE CULTURAL-EDUCATIONAL DEPARTMENT
Chapter 12 - PUNISHMENT AND REWARD
SHIZO: PUNISHMENT CELLS
POCHTOVYI YASHCHIK: POST OFFICE BOX
DOM SVIDANII: THE HOUSE OF MEETINGS
Chapter 13 - THE GUARDS
Chapter 14 - THE PRISONERS
URKI: THE CRIMINALS
KONTRIKI AND BYTOVYE: THE POLITICALS AND THE ORDINARY PRISONERS
Chapter 15 - WOMEN AND CHILDREN
Chapter 16 - THE DYING
Chapter 17 - STRATEGIES OF SURVIVAL
TUFTA: PRETENDING TO WORK
PRIDURKI: COOPERATION AND COLLABORATION
SANCHAST: HOSPITALS AND DOCTORS
“ORDINARY VIRTUES”
Chapter 18 - REBELLION AND ESCAPE
PART THREE - THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CAMP–
INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, 1940—1986
Chapter 19 - THE WAR BEGINS
Chapter 20 - “STRANGERS”
Chapter 21 - AMNESTY—AND AFTERWARD
Chapter 22 - THE ZENITH OF THE CAMP–INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
Chapter 23 - THE DEATH OF STALIN
Chapter 24 - THE ZEKS’ REVOLUTION
Chapter 25 - THAW—AND RELEASE
Chapter 26 - THE ERA OF THE DISSIDENTS
Chapter 27 - THE 1980s: SMASHING STATUES
Appendix - HOW MANY?
NOTES
Epilogue - MEMORY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
TEXT AND ILLUSTRATION PERMISSIONS
GLOSSARY
About the Author
Also by Anne Applebaum
Copyright Page
This Book Is Dedicated to
Those Who Described What Happened
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months
waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the
crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue
from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before.
Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a
whisper (everyone whispered there):
“Can you describe this?”
And I said: “I can.”
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been
her face . . .
—Anna Akhmatova, “Instead of a Preface: Requiem 1935–1940”
Acclaim for Anne Applebaum’s
GULAG
Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize
“Should become the standard history of one of the greatest evils of the twentieth
century.” —The Economist
“Thorough, engrossing. . . . A searing attack on the corruption and the
viciousness that seemed to rule the system and a testimonial to the resilience of
the Russian people. . . . Her research is impeccable.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“An affecting book that enables us at last to see the Gulag whole. . . . A valuable
and necessary book.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Ambitious and well-documented. . . . Invaluable. . . . Applebaum methodically,
and unflinchingly, provides a sense of what it was like to enter and inhabit the
netherworld of the Gulag.” —The New Yorker
“[Applebaum’s] writing is powerful and incisive, but it achieves this effect
through simplicity and restraint rather than stylistic flourish. . . . [An] admirable
and courageous book.” —The Washington Monthly
“Monumental. . . . Applebaum uses her own formidable reporting skills to
construct a gripping narrative.” —Newsday
“Valuable. There is nothing like it in Russian or in any other language. It
deserves to be widely read.” —Financial Times
“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.” —The Times Literary Supplement
“A truly impressive achievement. . . . We should all be grateful to [Applebaum].”
—The Sunday Times (London)
“A chronicle of ghastly human suffering, a history of one of the greatest abuses
of power in the story of our species, and a cautionary tale of towering moral
significance. . . . A magisterial work, written in an unflinching style that moves
as much as it shocks, and that glistens with the teeming life and stinking
putrefaction of doomed men and rotten ideals.” —The Daily Telegraph (London)
“No Western author until Anne Applebaum attempted to produce a history of the
Gulag based on the combination of eyewitness accounts and archival records.
The result is an impressively thorough and detailed study; no aspect of this topic
escapes her attention. Well written, accessible . . . enlightening for both the
general reader and the specialist.” —The New York Sun
“For the raw human experience of the camps, read Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovich or Irina Ratushinskaya’s Grey is the Color of Hope.
For the scope, context, and the terrible extent of the criminality, read this
history.” —Chicago Tribune
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No book is ever really the work of one person, but this book truly could not have
been written without the practical, intellectual, and philosophical contribution of
many people, some of whom count among my closest friends, and some of
whom I never met. Although it is unusual, in acknowledgments, for authors to
thank writers who are long dead, I would like to give special recognition to a
small but unique group of camp survivors whose memoirs I read over and over
again while writing this book. Although many survivors wrote profoundly and
eloquently of their experiences, it is simply no accident that this book contains a
preponderance of quotations from the works of Varlam Shalamov, Isaak
Filshtinsky, Gustav Herling, Evgeniya Ginzburg, Lev Razgon, Janusz Bardach,
Olga Adamova-Sliozberg, Anatoly Zhigulin, Alexander Dolgun, and, of course,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Some of these number among the most famous of
Gulag survivors. Others do not—but they all have one thing in common. Out of
the many hundreds of memoirs I read, theirs stood out, not only for the strength
of their prose but also for their ability to probe beneath the surface of everyday
horror and to discover deeper truths about the human condition.
I am also more than grateful for the help of a number of Muscovites who
guided me through archives, introduced me to survivors, and provided their own
interpretations of their past at the same time. First among them is the archivist
and historian Alexander Kokurin—whom I hope will one day be remembered as
a pioneer of the new Russian history—as well as Galya Vinogradova and Alla
Boryna, both of whom dedicated themselves to this project with unusual fervor.
At different times, I was aided by conversations with Anna Grishina, Boris
Belikin, Nikita Petrov, Susanna Pechora, Alexander Guryanov, Arseny
Roginsky, and Natasha Malykhina of Moscow Memorial; Simeon Vilensky of
Vozvrashchenie; as well as Oleg Khlevnyuk, Zoya Eroshok, Professor Natalya
Lebedeva, Lyuba Vinogradova, and Stanisław Gregorowicz, formerly of the
Polish Embassy in Moscow. I am also extremely grateful to the many people
who granted me long, formal interviews, whose names are listed separately in
the Bibliography.
Outside of Moscow, I owe a great deal to many people who were willing to
drop everything and suddenly devote large chunks of time to a foreigner who
had arrived, sometimes out of the blue, to ask naïve questions about subjects
they had been researching for years. Among them were Nikolai Morozov and
Mikhail Rogachev in Syktyvkar; Zhenya Khaidarova and Lyuba Petrovna in
Vorkuta; Irina Shabulina and Tatyana Fokina in Solovki; Galina Dudina in
Arkhangelsk; Vasily Makurov, Anatoly Tsigankov and Yuri Dmitriev in
Petrozavodsk; Viktor Shmirov in Perm; Leonid Trus in Novosibirsk; Svetlana
Doinisena, director of the local history museum in Iskitim; Veniamin Ioffe and
Irina Reznikova of St. Petersburg Memorial. I am particularly grateful to the
librarians of the Arkhangelsk Kraevedcheskaya Biblioteka, several of whom
devoted an entire day to me and my efforts to understand the history of their
region, simply because they felt it was important to do so.
In Warsaw I was greatly aided by the library and archives run by the Karta
Institute, as well as by conversations with Anna Dzienkiewicz and Dorota Pazio.
In Washington, D.C., David Nordlander and Harry Leich helped me at the
Library of Congress. I am particularly grateful to Elena Danielson, Thomas
Henrikson, Lora Soroka, and especially Robert Conquest of the Hoover
Institution. The Italian historian Marta Craveri contributed a great deal to my
understanding of the camp rebellions. Conservations with Vladimir Bukovsky
and Alexander Yakovlev also helped my comprehension of the post-Stalinist era.
I owe a special debt to the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M.
Olin Foundation, the Hoover Institution, the Märit and Hans Rausing
Foundation, and John Blundell at the Institute of Economic Affairs for their
financial and moral support.
I would also like to thank the friends and colleagues who offered their advice,
practical and historical, during the writing of this book. Among them are Antony
Beevor, Colin Thubron, Stefan and Danuta Waydenfeld, Yuri Morakov, Paul
Hofheinz, Amity Shlaes, David Nordlander, Simon Heffer, Chris Joyce,
Alessandro Missir, Terry Martin, Alexander Gribanov, Piotr Paszkowski, and
Orlando Figes, as well as Radek Sikorski, whose ministerial briefcase proved
very useful indeed. Special thanks are owed to Georges Borchardt, Kristine
Puopolo, Gerry Howard, and Stuart Proffitt, who oversaw this book to
completion.
Finally, for their friendship, their wise suggestions, their hospitality, and their
food I would like to thank Christian and Natasha Caryl, Edward Lucas, Yuri