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It's a really lackluster, half-baked stab at a monumental subject. And somehow, she manages to make the subject boring. This is just a rehash of the Gulag Archipelago, with a few new bits of information that have come since Solzhenitsyn published his great work. Applebaum even borrows the structure of her book from Solzhenitsyn.
This is a brilliant account of the GULAG system. It only ended because it simply became inefficient to run slave labour camps. Should be read in conjunction with Donald Rayfield's excellent Stalin and His Hangmen: An Authoritative Portrait of A Tyrant and Those Who Served Him and Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Signet Classics). Unlike Hitler, Stalin inflicted his terror mostly on his own population including imprisoning millions of them in the GULAG. So much of communist behaviour was just a continuation of Tsarist policies including banishing people to Siberia - but it took the communists to turn the GULAG into a vast slave labour system that the Soviet economy depended on.
One must thank God that Americans took a more noble and humane path for their history. Seems like Russia -and the rest of the world- is in for some more trouble soon.One might wrongly assume that once through the first half of the book, the second will be just more of the same, but read on, it can always get worse.Despite the huge amount of information it collects, it still does not cover the story of the "special exiles", millions of people who were sent not to concentration camps but to live in remote villages were they died of cold, starvation or overwork.Gorky's description of the prisoners of the forced labor camps, and the kulaks: "half-animals".
Their arrests were caused by "the cunning work of foreign intelligence services".With this kind of people abounding in your country what can anyone expect. He and the other "intellectuals" were the ones most exhilarated by the "progress" of Soviet society.What still amazes me most is the extreme of voluntary blindness that many Russian communists reached to explain away their own arrests and torture: "We are honest Soviet people, hurrah for Stalin, we aren't guilty and our state will free us from the company of all these enemies.
It's a work of labor as much as debt and seer investigative powers. "The new Russian elite's arrogant contempt for its fellow citizens lives on" says the author.
Thank God, again and again, for America. It covers every aspect of the Gulag system from its pre-history to its closing-down.Russia's history is sad, unsentimental, and violent.
If people get what they deserve, the Russians must be really wicked, and Americans must congratulate themselves.Take these words from a Russian of today: "Perhaps the old system was bad -but at least we were powerful, we don't want to hear that it was bad." So will the devil himself say on the day of reckoning.Bad people make bad systems.
Second, Jews diverted from the gas chambers and into forced labor, while a minority, were hardly a "tiny number." They numbered in the few hundred thousands, of which a large fraction ended up surviving the war. To begin with, although the Nazis were in power from 1933 to 1945, the systematic large-scale murders of Jews didn't begin until mid-1941. g, the early-1940's Poles) could be rehabilitated, that the status of subject peoples changed over time, etc. In contrast, she asserts that Nazi policies towards Jews were universal, unchangeable, and guaranteeing their deaths. (p.
These include the Schutzjuden (full-blooded German Jews relabeled Aryans), the Karaites, American and British POWs who were openly Jewish, and Finland's (Germany's ally) Jews. Applebaum doesn't suggest that the Communists and Nazis were equally bad--quite the opposite. My guess is that the destruction of cultures, but not of the peoples, suited his purposes better." (p. xxix). If anything, Auschwitz Kommandant Hoess admired the "passive"-death forced-labor methods used by the Soviets to annihilate entire nationalities.But why not kill ALL enemies immediately and completely.
Finally, as Applebaum herself notes (p. Instead of repeating other reviewers, let's clarify some issues. This is manifestly incorrect. Second, the Sikorski-Maisky Pact was actually insincere, and only a temporary expedient. She softens the Gulags, relative to Nazi camps (pp. GULAG stands for GLAVNOE UPRAVLENIE LAGEREI.
Applebaum's statements about the changing status of incarcerated Poles (1941-1942) themselves need qualification. There is no evidence that, even when the Red Army was on the ropes in late 1941, Stalin at any time intended to return Poland's eastern territories or respect Poland's sovereignty. Other than being "enemies of the people", as defined by Communist ideology, what crimes did my mother, grandmother, and aunt commit. To begin with, unlike Stalin relative to the Poles, Hitler was never in a position in which his release of the Jews could have potentially staved off his impending defeat. Over 1,600 Jews were released by the Kastner-Eichmann deal, and tens of thousands of others were saved by getting diplomatic immunity. XV).
Most amazing of all, Applebaum asserts that: "Nevertheless, the Soviet camp system as a whole was not deliberately organized to mass-produce corpses--even if, at times, it did." (p. Finally, entire classes of known Jews were in fact deliberately spared by the Nazis. (p. While some incarcerated Poles got to leave the USSR, most Poles did not--something which Applebaum incorrectly attributes to the haste of Anders. 300, 433, 465), no sooner had the Soviets re-entered Poland (1944) than they began sending Poles to the Gulags anew. Applebaum comments: "Given the climate of the time, the cruelty of the war, and the presence, a few thousand kilometers to the west, of another planned genocide, some have wondered why Stalin did not simply murder the ethnic groups he so despised.
Other than the factors of time and efficiency, the Nazis didn't care if undesirables died from shooting or gassing, or from overwork and disease. 430). This would be news to the Nazis, who carefully studied the Gulag system in order to emulate it (see, for example, the Peczkis review of Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz). I am amused by the Communist apologist reviewers who insist that the Gulags held only common criminals. 453). A million Jews could have been freed by the Nazis had the trucks-for-Jews deal not fallen through.
xxxiii-xxxix), by pointing to the fact that Gulag prisoners (e. Nor were the Jews spared or released an "unusual exception".
The GULAG forever scarred the souls of the tens of millions of Soviet (and non-Soviet) men, women, and children that survived their sentences and continues to influence everyday life in Putin's Russia."The old Stalinist division between "enemies" lives on in the new Russian elite's arrogant contempt for its fellow citizens," concludes Applebaum. Many more were beaten to death or died from starvation, overwork, exposure, suicide and sickness.Large numbers of common Soviet citizens were arrested and sentenced simply because the regime needed their particular expertise or their labor to better exploit the natural and mineral resources of the Soviet Union's remote northern and far eastern regions. Indeed, it was slave labor, on a massive scale, that transformed the Soviet Union through the large-scale construction of roads, bridges, towns, cities, and industry in the country's most remote regions.The end result is an unparalleled look at life and death in Stalin's death camps. This is an extremely well researched and superbly written book.Author Anne Applebaum does a stellar job in discussing all aspects of the Soviet Union's notorious GULAG (concentration camps). "Unless that elite soon comes to recognize the value and the importance of all of Russia's citizens, to honor both their civil and their human rights, Russia is ultimately fated to become today's northern Zaire, a land populated by impoverished peasants and billionaire politicians who keep their assets in Swiss bank vaults and their private jets on runways, engines running." According to Applebaum, almost 30 million Soviet citizens were arrested between 1930 and 1953 and sentenced to suffer in the GULAGs. She utilizes Russian archival sources and personalizes them with the memoirs of camp survivors as well as dozens and dozens of interviews. Almost 3 million were executed.
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