Gulag

A History

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Gulag

By: Anne Applebaum

Narrated by: Laural Merlington

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About this listen

Pulitzer Prize, General Nonfiction, 2004

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. In this magisterial and acclaimed history, Anne Applebaum 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.

Applebaum intimately recreates 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 20th century.

20th Century

Eastern

Europe

Modern

Politics & Government

Russia

World

Soviet Union

Stalin

Socialism

Imperialism

Holocaust

War

Capitalism

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Most relevant

Who engaged the narrator? She can't pronounce any of the Russian words or names in the book. It's embarrassingly bad.

As for the content, it is generally fascinating and well-researched. It makes the argument quite strongly that there is a continuity between Lenin's approach and Stalin's. However conversely it insists that there's very little continuity with the Tsarist regime practices. I feel 1) that certainly Lenin's regime was violent and authoritarian, and established a pattern that paved the way for the Stalinist Gulag, but that there was both a quantitative and qualitative difference between the early Bolshevik repression and the Stalinist system, and 2) the practice of the repressive state in Russia does have a continuity between the Tsarist, Leninist, Stalinist and the Post communist Putinist system, even though of course the Stalinist gulag was the apogee. This seems obvious to me and saying so doesn't whitewash Stalin or indeed any of the other really bad governments that Russians have had to endure.