Gulag - by Anne Applebaum (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published in hardcover: New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Book Synopsis

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER - This magisterial and acclaimed history offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost.

"A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be." --The New York Times

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century

The Gulag--a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners--was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, Gulag is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century.

Review Quotes

ONE OF GQ's 50 BEST BOOKS OF LITERARY JOURNALISM OF THE 21st CENTURY

"The most authoritative--and comprehensive--account of this Soviet blight ever published by a Western writer." --Newsweek

"A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be." -The New York Times

"An important book. . . . It is fervently to be hoped that people will read Anne Applebaum's excellent, tautly written, and very damning history." --The New York Times Book Review

"A titanic achievement: learned and moving and profound. . . . No reader will easily forget Applebaum's vivid accounts of the horrible human suffering of the Gulag." --National Review

"Lucid, painstakingly detailed, never sensational, it should have a place on every educated reader's shelves." -Los Angeles Times

"Magisterial. . . . Certain to remain the definitive account of its subject for years to come. . . . An immense achievement." --The New Criterion

"An excellent account of the rise and fall of the Soviet labor camps between 1917 and 1986. . . . A splendid book." --The New York Review of Books

"Should become the standard history of one of the greatest evils of the 20th 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." -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 specialists." --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

About the Author

Anne Applebaum is a columnist and member of the editorial board of the Washington Post. A graduate of Yale and a Marshall Scholar, she has worked as the foreign and deputy editor of the Spectator (London), as the Warsaw correspondent for the Economist, and as a columnist for the on-line magazine Slate, as well as for several British newspapers. Her work has also appeared in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, and the Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Radek Sikorski, and two children.