Name: Doug Belshaw's review of Gulag by Anne Applebaum
Item: Gulag
Rating: 5
Author: Doug Belshaw

Anne Applebaum

Gulag

A powerful ending calling for a way for the Russian people to remember the horrors of the Soviet system.

Doug Belshaw

The more we are able to understand how different societies have transformed their neighbours and fellow citizens from people into objects, the more we know of the specific circumstances which led to each episode of mass torture and mass murder, the better we will understand the darker side of our own human nature. This book was not written 'so that it will not happen again', as the cliché would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people. Destruction of the 'objective enemy', as Hannah Arendt once put it, remains a fundamental object of many dictatorships. We need to know why — and each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, a piece of the explanation. Without them, we will wake up one day and realize that we do not know who we are.

For 1966 also marked another milestone: the birth of the term 'samizdat.' An acronym that deliberately echoed the term Gosizdat, or 'State Publishing House,' samizday literally means 'self-publishing house', and figuratively refers to the underground press. 

The writer and folk poet Bulat Okudzhava has also written a story describing a man's encounter with his mother who has spent 10 years in camps. The man anticipated his mother's return with pleasure, believing he would pick her up at the train station, take her home for dinner after a tearful but joyful reunion, tell her of his life, maybe even go and see a film. Instead, he found a woman with dry eyes and detached expression: 'She looked at me but didn't see me, her face was hardened, frozen.' He had expected her to be physically frail, but was totally unprepared for emotional damage - an experience that millions must have shared.

To write a straightforward description of 'tufta' - a word which translates, very imprecisely, as 'swindling the boss' - is not an easy task. For one, such practices were so deeply ingrained in the Soviet system' that it's hardly fair to describe them as I'd they were somehow unique to the Gulag. Nor were they unique to the USSR. The communist-era proverb, 'They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work,' could once be heart in most is the languages of the old Warsaw Pact.

In fact, this question – 'Did they believe in what they were doing?' - is actually a small part of a much larger question, one which goes to the heart of the nature of the Soviet Union itself: did any of its leaders ever believe in what they were doing? The relationship between Soviet propaganda and Soviet reality was always a strange one: the factory is barely functioning, in the shops there was nothing to buy, old ladies cannot afford to heat their apartments, yet on the streets outside, banners proclaim the 'triumph of socialism' and the 'heroic achievements of the Soviet system'.

It's not just under capitalism that chats need to go up and go the right, it would seem.

In many camps, norms were set really impossibly high. In part this was a side effect of the logic of Soviet central planning, which decreed that enterprises had to increase their output every year. Elinor Olitskaya remembered her fellow inmates struggling to fulfil the norms in a camp sewing factory, wanting to keep their warm, indoor jobs. But because they did fulfil them, the camp administration kept waiting them, as a result of which they became unattainable.

This is the author quoting Solzhenitsyn explaining the logic of the Soviet guards on the transports to the Gulag: "why should a Soviet soldier have to carry water like a donkey for enemies of the people?" So many died of dehydration.

Truly frightening, especially when you hear the rhetoric coming out of the US at the moment. I can't bear to share the section of this book describing what happened to the women onboard some of these transports. 

It takes a long time to dole out that water. The zeks don't have their own mugs. Whoever did have one has had it taken away from him – so what it adds up to is that they have to be given the two government issue mugs to drink out of, and while they are drinking up you have to keep standing there and standing, and dipping it out and dipping it out some more and handing it to them...

But the convoy could have borne with all that, hauled the water, and doled it out, if only those pigs, after slurping up the water, didn't ask to go to the toilet. So here's the way it works out: if you don't give them water for a day, and they don't ask to go to the toilet. Give them water once, and they go to the toilet once; take pity on them and give them water twice – and they go to the toilet twice. So it's pure and simple common sense: just don't give them anything to drink.

An absolutely devastating book to read, one that charts the abject horrors of the Stalinist regime. I read it slowly because it's easy to become immune to the sheer scale of the brutality. One becomes numb to the numbers.

I have a deep fascination in Russian literature and history, so I'm glad I read it. Would I recommend others do so? I'm not sure. 

What we can agree on is that Anne Applebaum deserves all of the plaudits she received when this book was published around 20 years ago. An incredible effort.

An absolutely devastating book to read, one that charts the abject horrors of the Stalinist regime. I read it slowly because it's easy to become immune to the sheer scale of the brutality. One becomes numb to the numbers.

I have a deep fascination in Russian literature and history, so I'm glad I read it. Would I recommend others do so? I'm not sure. 

What we can agree on is that Anne Applebaum deserves all of the plaudits she received when this book was published around 20 years ago. An incredible effort.

Doug Belshaw &
Gulag by Anne Applebaum

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Doug Belshaw &
Gulag by Anne Applebaum