Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps

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There is no single reason that liberal democracy is in such a precarious state, Applebaum notes. Crisp, elegant prose.” —The Christian Science Monitor Valuable. There is nothing like it in Russian, or in any other language. It deserves to be widely read.”– Financial Times Anne, Applebaum (January 15, 2019). "The anti-Europeans have a plan for crippling the European Union". The Washington Post. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Petrone, Justine. "Interview with Anne Applebaum". City Paper. Baltic News Ltd. Archived from the original on July 20, 2011 . Retrieved October 3, 2009.

According to the records of their conversations, the ministers and Politburo members who were planning what was to become one of the cruelest prison systems in the world never discussed the need to punish prisoners, never mentioned their living conditions, and certainly never referred to the official ideology of “re-education” in their internal debates about the new system, which went on for about a year. Stalin, although not present, took a great interest in the proceedings, occasionally intervening if the “wrong” conclusions were reached.4 Stalin harped on this theme, particularly as relations with peasants deteriorated and procurement problems intensified. Ukrainian officials, including senior ones, tried to tell him that it was no longer a matter of peasants concealing grain: they actually had none, not even for their own survival through the winter and the spring sowing. But Stalin was sceptical on principle of bureaucrats who came with sob stories to explain their own failure to meet targets and discounted the warnings. Angry and paranoid after his wife killed herself in November 1932, he preferred to see the procurement shortfall as the result of sabotage. So there was no let-up in state pressure through the winter of 1932-3, and peasants fleeing the hungry villages were shut out of the cities. Stalin eased up the pressure in the spring of 1933, but it was too late to avert the famine.

By the summer of 1954, the unprofitability of the camps was widely recognized. Another survey of the Gulag's finances, carried out in June 1954, had again shown that they were heavily subsidized, and that the costs of guards in particular made them unprofitable. [15] [...] The incentive to change was now overwhelming—and change came. [4]

DECREE OF THE PRESIDENT OF UKRAINE No. 595/2022". President of Ukraine. August 23, 2022 . Retrieved September 12, 2022.Anne Applebaum – internationales literaturfestival berlin". Literaturfestival.com (in German). Archived from the original on March 2, 2017 . Retrieved April 3, 2017. Applebaum, Anne, 1964– (Interviews with Terry Gross)". freshairarchive.org . Retrieved July 22, 2020. Applebaum, Anne (January 15, 2019). "The anti-Europeans have a plan for crippling the European Union". The Washington Post. Yet although it was, at the time, taken as axiomatic that prison labor was cheaper–in 1935, Genrikh Yagoda, then chief of the OGPU, wrote a letter to Stalin promising that every kilometer of road built by prisoners would be 50,000 rubles cheaper–the consensus among the new generation of Russian historians is that the camp system was in fact an inefficient diversion of the country’s resources, which permanently damaged its economic development. In Labor Camp Socialism, Galina Ivanova points out that the economic activity of the secret police was, by the late 1940s, “so irrational and inefficient that even such a potentially lucrative form of commercial activity as ‘renting out workers’ did not bring the ministry any profit.” Oleg Khlevniuk, who is currently compiling a collection of Gulag documents for Yale University Press, also notes that in calculating the Gulag’s efficiency, the system’s masters failed to count the costs of the repressive system, including the costs of the guards, of the deaths, and most of all of the misdirected talent.8 How did it serve the country to have brilliant physicists (not all of them made it into Beria’s “Special Technical Bureaus”) digging coal?

The risk of twilight of our western democratic model, the uncertainty of what may follow—a brighter dawn or a darker night—require that all warnings be urgently considered. This book demands such consideration.” —The Irish Times Also in July 2020, Applebaum was one of the 153 signers of the "Harper's Letter" (also known as " A Letter on Justice and Open Debate") that expressed concern that "the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted." [43]

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Roundtable: Bolstering Democracy in the Age of Rising Authoritarianism". House Foreign Affairs Committee. January 20, 2022 . Retrieved January 18, 2022. Anne, who received the Pulitzer Prize for Gulag, has made one of her professional preoccupations (to borrow from Robert Burns) man’s inhumanity to man—­specifically, though not exclusively, the in­humanity manifest in Soviet and post-Soviet history. Her book Red Famine is the definitive study of Stalin’s calculated starvation of Ukraine. Anne’s work on that catastrophe prepared her to write about Ukraine’s latest calamity, a calamity whose author is Stalin’s worthy successor. Readers of The Atlantic have benefited from Anne’s erudition, vision, and trenchant writing. Applebaum, Anne (December 12, 2019). "The False Romance of Russia". The Atlantic . Retrieved September 27, 2021. a b Neacşu, Dana (January 2004). "Advocacy As History? That Takes The Prize! [Review of the book Gulag: A History, by A. Applebaum]". Santa Clara Law Review. 45 (1): 213. The third part of Gulag is dedicated to the effects of the war on the camps, their transformation once the war ended, the effects of Stalin’s death, and the eventual dissolution of the system all-together.