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   From: pedro1940@progression.net   
      
   Gulag: A History   
   by Anne Applebaum    
      
      
   Siberia. The word has had a chilling connotation for people around the world   
   for 200 years. Long before Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, the   
   tsarist regime had used the vast area that stretches from the Ural Mountains   
   to the Pacific and    
   Arctic Oceans as a place of exile and forced labor for dissidents, political   
   prisoners, and ordinary criminals.    
      
   Indeed, the Russian imperial government had sent off many of the leading   
   figures of the future Soviet government into exile in the years before the   
   First World War, including Lenin and Stalin.    
      
   But as cruel as the tsarist system may have seemed to those who suffered under   
   it, it was mild and benevolent in comparison with the future Soviet regime.    
      
   When Lenin and Stalin were ordered into exile by the Russian authorities at   
   the beginning of the 20th century, they traveled to their places of exile on   
   their own recognizance, with government railway passes to their destinations   
   in Siberia.    
      
   They lived in isolated villages, but they could hunt and fish, read and write,   
   and maintain correspondence with their friends and comrades. Political   
   prisoners sent into exile were considered to be above the common criminal,   
   people of ideological    
   conscience who were to be treated differently.    
      
   Having lived and continued to work for their Marxist cause in Siberian exile   
   under the tsars, the Bolshevik leaders knew the strengths and weaknesses of   
   the prison and exile systems of the Russian Empire.    
      
   When they came to power in November 1917, they soon introduced their own   
   system of prisons and forced labor camps in the huge reaches of the empire   
   they inherited during and after the Russian Civil War of 1918–1921, which   
   had left them fully triumphant.   
       
      
   Lenin and Stalin understood that any system of imprisonment and exile like the   
   one they had lived through under the tsars would enable their opponents to   
   maintain and extend their opposition to Soviet power.    
      
   Thus, the new prison system that became the Gulag was designed to prevent and   
   indeed destroy any ability for enemies of the Communist regime to continue   
   their resistance.    
      
   Furthermore, and most especially under Stalin, the Gulag was turned into a   
   vast slave system to provide the human material for “building socialism”   
   with cheap and seemingly limitless supplies of labor.   
      
   In other words, during the 25 years of Stalin’s leadership of the Soviet   
   state, the Gulag was made into an essential element in the system of socialist   
   central planning for the construction of entire new industrial cities in empty   
   and inhospitable    
   regions of northern Russia, Siberia, and Central Asia and supplied manpower to   
   extract raw materials and precious metals from regions of the country that   
   were virtually unfit for human habitation.    
      
   From Lenin’s time to the end of the Soviet system under Gorbachev, literally   
   millions of victims of the regime entered and passed through the Gulag system,   
   with many of them never living through the experience.    
      
   But among those who did survive the ordeal, hundreds wrote about the nightmare   
   of it all. And from the 1920s to the 1990s many of these accounts were   
   published in the West.    
      
   Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume Gulag Archipelago and Eugeniya   
   Ginsburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind are among the   
   better-known accounts that have been available to the Western reader.    
      
   And David Dallen and Boris Nicolaevsky’s Forced Labor in Soviet Russia and   
   Nikolai Tolstoi’s, Stalin’s Secret War have been among the carefully   
   documented secondary summaries of the nature of the system.    
      
      
   The workings of the Gulag   
   But Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History is the first volume that attempts to   
   give a detailed and fairly comprehensive narrative of the origin, purpose,   
   workings, and reality of the system based both on the memoirs of those who   
   lived through and survived    
   the camps and on the now-available archive documents in Russia.    
      
   The first part of the volume is devoted to explaining how the first prison   
   camps were established in 1918 on islands in the White Sea in northern   
   European Russia. The prisoners were mostly non-Bolshevik socialists. Soon the   
   apparent tsarist style of    
   imprisonment was replaced with the cruel severity that became the hallmark of   
   the system in future years.    
      
   Even so, the Bolsheviks at first tried to make it a showcase of humane   
   treatment, but the camps on the islands were shortly after closed to prevent   
   visitors from seeing the reality of how they were run.    
      
   The first great exercise with slave labor was also given publicity: the   
   building of the White Sea Canal. But this was never done again, especially   
   after the canal fell into disuse because of the poor and primitive manner in   
   which it was constructed.    
      
   The Soviet leadership, in fact, did not want attention for the Gulag. Its   
   purpose was not propaganda but rather mass labor under increasingly despicable   
   conditions. Applebaum recounts the arrest processes and the initial   
   imprisonments.    
      
   To obtain confessions prisoners were kept awake day and night, made to stand   
   during the long hours of interrogation, beaten, tortured, and dehumanized.   
   Prison cells were often overcrowded with no room to sit or sleep.    
      
   When it was time to send them off to the camps, they were crowded into cattle   
   cars with no sanitary facilities, poor ventilation, and meager food supplies.   
   The journey to the destination camps in these conditions could last for weeks   
   or even months.    
      
   Those who lived through the trip — and many died along the way — often   
   found themselves deposited in empty wastelands of tundra, swamps, dense   
   forests, deserts, or the frigid expanse of the Arctic Circle region.    
      
   They would have to forage or hunt for food and, with few or no tools, build   
   living quarters. Then they were set to work clearing timber areas, mining for   
   metals, minerals, or precious gems, or constructing new industrial cities out   
   of the barren terrain.    
      
      
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