Gulag: A History

Anne Applebaum tells the history of the Soviet Gulag, the vast system of forced labor camps that held millions of prisoners from the early years of Lenin's government through the system's effective end in the 1980s. The book moves chronologically across three long sections, the camp system's origins and growth under Lenin and then Stalin through the 1930s, the daily mechanics of camp life, the labor, the food, the guards, the ways prisoners tried to survive, and finally the system's slow transformation and decline in the decades after Stalin's death.

Applebaum draws heavily on archival material opened after the Soviet collapse alongside published survivor accounts, including the writing of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov, building a history grounded as much in individual testimony as in official records. She argues that the camps functioned above all as an instrument for eliminating people the state considered enemies rather than as a rationally organized labor system, even though forced labor was also, separately, genuinely important to the Soviet economy, and she draws a careful distinction between the Gulag's purpose and the deliberate mass killing carried out in Nazi camps during the same period.

The book closes with an account of how former Soviet states have remembered, or largely failed to publicly reckon with, the Gulag's history since the union's collapse. Applebaum states her own reason for writing plainly, that a history like this one matters because something like it could happen again if it goes unexamined. It suits a reader who wants a comprehensive, source grounded history of Soviet political repression rather than a single survivor's account, though it draws on many such accounts along the way.