Gulag: A History

"Man is a creature that can get used to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him."

--Fyodor Dostoevsky
The House of the Dead


I finally finished Anne Applebaum's Pultzer Prize winning book, "Gulag: A History."

It is the story of the Gulag slave labor/prison system set up after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and was made even more horrific under Stalin. She follows the Gulag system to its official end in 1991.

I Love the darker side of history because so many people refuse to look at it. Maybe they're scared of it, I don't know. Folk refuse to look at the real history of the U.S. dealing with the indigenous.

This amazing book taught me a lot of history I never knew.

After WWII, there were many prisoners Russia wanted back that were no longer in their territory. In Austria, for example, there were 20,000 Cossack prisoners. The Brits forced marched them to the trains at bayonette point (mostly women and children). The Cossacks knew what awaited them in Russia under Stalin, execution or the Gulag. When crossing a bridge, women were throwing their children into the water then jumping to their deaths behind them. One man in a park killed his wife, children, then committed suicide himself. The Brits didn't have to force the Cossacks back, but you know how they are.

Survival in the Gulag throughout its existence was quite amazing. Folk could make tools from the simplest things. They were also mostly starved, many to death. These forced labor camps did all sorts of things from lumber, creating canals and roads, etc. In the end, however, the maintenance of the system was more costly than it was worth.

There were all sorts of poltiical prisoners. Stalin practiced all sorts of clearances and ethnic cleansings.

Women were often raped, many were gang raped to death on the transport ships in the '30's, and stacked like cord wood at their doorway threshold until the guards decided it was time to stop. Many women whose names are long forgotten were tossed into the sea after being raped to death on these ships.

But the system always breaks, can never take the weight of such constant oppression. After Stalin's death in '53, it all started falling apart.

In '54, there was a revolt in the Kenrig camp that lasted for 40 days. The men broke a whole in the wall that separated the men from the women and one and all actually got along well. The men (especially the criminal sort) didn't rape the women, there was a beautiful cooperation. Couples were getting married if they weren't already. One woman was quoted as saying it was the most free she had ever felt (even after her time was served). Just before dawn on June 26, 1954, the Soviets attacked using 5 tanks and heavily armed personell. First they sent in the tanks immediately claiming the lives of six women by running them over. The soviet official dead is something 45, the witnesses claim well over 500 with over 1000 wounded. The 1 nurse and 1 doctor worked for 13 hours straight when the doctor collapsed. 6 hours into the operations, the nurse, whose hair had only started turning gray, had gone completely white.

In the end, the Gulag system fell. The resistance won, but it took generations...generations.

A must read in my opinion.