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Summary
Summary
The Gulag--the vast array of Soviet concentration camps--was a system of repression and punishment whose rationalized evil and institutionalized inhumanity were rivaled only by the Holocaust.
The Gulag entered the world's historical consciousness in 1972, with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's epic oral history of the Soviet camps, The Gulag Archipelago . Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, dozens of memoirs and new studies covering aspects of that system have been published in Russia and the West. Using these new resources as well as her own original historical research, Anne Applebaum has now undertaken, for the first time, a fully documented history of the Soviet camp system, from its origins in the Russian Revolution to its collapse in the era of glasnost. It is an epic feat of investigation and moral reckoning that places the Gulag where it belongs: at the center of our understanding of the troubled history of the twentieth century.
Anne Applebaum first lays out the chronological history of the camps and the logic behind their creation, enlargement, and maintenance. The Gulag was first put in place in 1918 after the Russian Revolution. In 1929, Stalin personally decided to expand the camp system, both to use forced labor to accelerate Soviet industrialization and to exploit the natural resources of the country's barely habitable far northern regions. By the end of the 1930s, labor camps could be found in all twelve of the Soviet Union's time zones. The system continued to expand throughout the war years, reaching its height only in the early 1950s. From 1929 until the death of Stalin in 1953, some 18 million people passed through this massive system. Of these 18 million, it is estimated that 4.5 million never returned.
But the Gulag was not just an economic institution. It also became, over time, a country within a country, almost a separate civilization, with its own laws, customs, literature, folklore, slang, and morality. Topic by topic, Anne Applebaum also examines how life was lived within this shadow country: how prisoners worked, how they ate, where they lived, how they died, how they survived. She examines their guards and their jailers, the horrors of transportation in empty cattle cars, the strange nature of Soviet arrests and trials, the impact of World War II, the relations between different national and religious groups, and the escapes, as well as the extraordinary rebellions that took place in the 1950s. She concludes by examining the disturbing question why the Gulag has remained relatively obscure, in the historical memory of both the former Soviet Union and the West.
Gulag: A History will immediately be recognized as a landmark work of historical scholarship and an indelible contribution to the complex, ongoing, necessary quest for truth.
Author Notes
ANNE APPLEBAUM was born in Washington, D.C., received a bachelor's degree from Yale, and studied at Saint Antony's College, Oxford, and the London School of Economics on a Marshall scholarship. In 1988, she moved to Poland to work for the Economist , and a few years later became foreign editor, then deputy editor, of the Spectator . Her work has also appeared in the New York Review of Books , the Wall Street Journal , Slate and other British and American publications. She is the author of one previous book, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe . After living for more than fifteen years in Europe, she joined the editorial board of the Washington Post in 2002 and now lives in Washington, D.C.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Nearly 30 million prisoners passed through the Soviet Union's labor camps in their more than 60 years of operation. This remarkable volume, the first fully documented history of the gulag, describes how, largely under Stalin's watch, a regulated, centralized system of prison labor-unprecedented in scope-gradually arose out of the chaos of the Russian Revolution. Fueled by waves of capricious arrests, this prison labor came to underpin the Soviet economy. Applebaum, a former Warsaw correspondent for the Economist and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, draws on newly accessible Soviet archives as well as scores of camp memoirs and interviews with survivors to trace the gulag's origins and expansion. By the gulag's peak years in the early 1950s, there were camps in every part of the country, and slave labor was used not only for mining and heavy industries but for producing every kind of consumer product (chairs, lamps, toys, those ubiquitous fur hats) and some of the country's most important science and engineering (Sergei Korolev, the architect of the Soviet space program, began his work in a special prison laboratory). Applebaum details camp life, including strategies for survival; the experiences of women and children in the camps; sexual relationships and marriages between prisoners; and rebellions, strikes and escapes. There is almost too much dark irony to bear in this tragic, gripping account. Applebaum's lucid prose and painstaking consideration of the competing theories about aspects of camp life and policy are always compelling. She includes an appendix in which she discusses the various ways of calculating how many died in the camps, and throughout the book she thoughtfully reflects on why the gulag does not loom as large in the Western imagination as, for instance, the Holocaust. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
We have massive amounts of data about the Nazi concentration and death camps, ranging from memoirs of survivors to incredibly detailed records kept by Nazi officials. The Nazi camps lasted just over a decade. On the other hand, the vast system of confinement, forced labor, and executions dubbed the "Gulag Archipelago" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn lasted almost 70 years, and we are just beginning to get a comprehensive picture of this affront to the human spirit. Applebaum is a former Marshall scholar and is now a journalist who covered the collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the gradual opening of KGB archives, the full horror of the Gulag is gradually emerging, and Applebaum has done a masterful job of chronicling the origin, growth, and eventual end of this monstrous system. Contrary to the beliefs of many, the Gulag was not a product of the Stalin era. Both Lenin and Trotsky staunchly backed the creation of these camps as a useful tool in their promotion of "Red Terror." Under Stalin, of course, the camps were greatly expanded, both as a repository for the victims of his various purges and as a vital component, via slave labor, in industrialization. Like the Nazi camps, the Gulag became a virtual industrial complex. Now, we are left with the evidence, the memory of survivors, and the moral obligation to uncover the full story. This brilliant and often heartbreaking work is a giant step in the fulfillment of that obligation. --Jay Freeman
Guardian Review
At the end of 1941 Time magazine made Joseph Stalin its Man of the Year. The US had entered the war a few weeks earlier and the USSR had become its main ally in Europe. Stalin's popularity in New York was not a new phenomenon. He had won the same award two years previously, when the citation had praised his statesmanship in signing a treaty with Adolf Hitler; this had been a period when Soviet armed forces were carrying out a brutal repression in eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia - and the Soviet-Finnish war was in spate. Time magazine was calibrating its editorial line to the perceived American interests of the moment. And its double award to the Soviet dictator gives the lie to the assumption that only the political left had a soft spot for Stalinism. Unfortunately Anne Applebaum begins her book on the gulag with this very assumption. Crediting Senator Joe McCarthy with having the right ideas about Stalin, she suggests that his message failed to get across to the public because his style of behaviour brought him into disrepute. This is a garbled version of what happened before and after Stalin's death. There was never a secret about the forced- labour system in the USSR, and when the cold war erupted after the second world war, plenty of politicians and writers castigated the Soviet order. Not only Harry Truman and Winston Churchill but also George Orwell and Arthur Koestler indicted the terrorist dictatorship in the USSR. Fellow travellers certainly existed. But the situation was complex and ever-changing and it is a pity that Applebaum has repeated a solecism that has become widespread since the fall of communism in Europe. Yet once she has cleared her throat, she tells a gripping and convincing story about the Soviet camp system. Alexander Solzhenitsyn preceded her, in much more difficult circumstances, with his Gulag Archipelago . He drew on the experiences of himself and his fellow convicts, and read widely in published records and secondary historical accounts. But he wrote before Gorbachev's perestroika. In recent years the pile of evidence has become mountainous as countless memoirs and documentary collections have appeared. A few scholars were even allowed into the archives of the police. Although this book contains little which has not yet appeared in the Russian press, she has interviewed several survivors of the gulag and has thoroughly examined recent publications. The result is an admirable summary of the present state of our knowledge. Forced labour had been used by the tsars; but although the communists were not slow to arrest political enemies and conduct terror, it was not until Stalin introduced his first five-year plan at the end of the 1920s that a consolidated system of labour camps was fully established in the USSR. The author highlights the importance of economic motives in the politburo's policy. The first camps were established in the inhospitable regions of the Russian north, eastern Siberia and elsewhere where natural resources awaited exploitation and where free labourers were reluctant to settle. It was a massive operation requiring a huge structure of personnel and institutions. Over it all stood the OGPU (forerunner of the KGB), soon to be incorporated in the NKVD. Successive police chiefs Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria refined the procedures so that the Main Administration of Camps (the Gulag, in its Russian acronym) might function normally as an integral organ of the Soviet institutional network. Subordinate to these police chiefs were the territorial leaders of the OGPU-NKVD, each of whom had to fulfil the arrest quotas assigned to their republic or province. They ran their own mini- economies. In their employment were guards, interrogators, journalists, lorry-drivers, railwaymen and informers. With Stalin's mania for signed confessions, indeed, the demand for shorthand secretaries rose exponentially as the number of arrests soared to a peak in 1937-1938. While Applebaum is correct in emphasising economics, she might have given more weight to politics. Stalin's propaganda left no doubt about who dominated Soviet politics. The corollary was that the vast strata of society which had been hurt by state policies knew exactly whom to blame. His campaign of repression, therefore, had a rational basis. Certainly the arrests were arbitrary in the sense that the police picked up millions of people who bore no grudge against him or his regime. But this happened mainly because the Soviet state, including its police, was worse informed and equipped than Hitler's security agencies in Germany; and the NKVD had to meet the quotas set in the Kremlin regardless of individual guilt or innocence. Nevertheless, Stalin really did have millions of enemies: former Bolshevik oppositionists, priests, ex-Mensheviks, nationalists, kulaks and traders. Deporting all of them to Turkey, as was done with Trotsky in 1929, was impractical. Nor was it safe to dump them unguarded in remote towns of the USSR. Since even Stalin did not see the point of universal extermination, the gulag was his alternative. Yet what did he intend for the camp inmates? A strength of the book is the author's insistence that conditions in the camp were meant to be severe but bearable. Only in the second world war, when malnutrition afflicted most people in the USSR, were the rations lowered below those levels. The problem was that the NKVD was corrupt and the food supplies and medicines assigned to the gulag were siphoned off at each stage of delivery to the camps. The consequent need arose for serial replenishment of convicts. Not that the authorities in Moscow were oblivious to these technical difficulties. (They did not give a toss for the human tragedy or for conventional morality.) Exposures of corruption and maladministration occasionally took place. Indeed confidential reports were produced which proved that the Gulag cost more than it produced for the state. Slave labour was diseconomic. It is one of the merits of Applebaum's survey that she shows not only the horror but also the stupidity of Vorkuta, Kolyma and Norilsk. Thus it becomes readily explicable why the camps started to be emptied in 1953 almost before Stalin's corpse had cooled. If anything, the accountancy of forced labour was still worse than the book allows. Soviet uranium, gold, nickel and timber were obtained by the wretches who were tipped like human debris into the remotest and coldest regions. Many hundreds of thousands belonged to groups in Soviet society with expertise and managerial skills. Unfit for hard labour, they were a massive loss to the "free economy". In fact, Stalin had a penchant for re-sentencing convicts once their term of forced labour had ended. The question arises how any remained alive when the camps started to be emptied after 1953. The answer is that most survivors had obtained jobs that gave them extra rations or lighter work. Solzhenitsyn was an example. He served his time in a camp dedicated to scientific research where the discipline was tough but the food was sufficient and the climate tolerable. In the worse camps of northern Russia and Siberia a convict needed to get transferred to medical work or to the kitchen in order to get by. The result was that their conditions improved, but this happened at the expense of the rest of the inmates who remained on less than adequate rations. Bread became the object of obsessive desire. Theft of it was one of the few forms of behaviour which drew universal hostility from prisoners whether they were politicals or ordinary criminals. Few inmates thought murder too strong a reaction for thieving a person's bread ration. Although the labour camps were not closed in 1953, the number of inmates was reduced and the degree of state terror was attenuated. Arrests of law-abiding citizens continued to take place under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Persecution of religious believers was common in the 1960s and the political dissenters of later decades could expect to be thrown in a camp, a psychiatric hospital or else deported. Yet judicial rehabilitation of victims was patchy. Systematic investigations of wrongful arrest and imprisonment were begun by Gorbachev when most victims were already dead. The process continues to this day. Historians have exposed the nature of Stalin's regime, but trials of known persecutors have been few. It would be difficult to put every guilty official on trial, but Anne Applebaum is right that more could have been done and could still be done. Robert Service's Russia: Experiment With a People, From 1991 to the Present is published by Macmillan. To order Gulag for pounds 22 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-service.1 Unfortunately [Anne Applebaum] begins her book on the gulag with this very assumption. Crediting Senator Joe McCarthy with having the right ideas about [Joseph Stalin], she suggests that his message failed to get across to the public because his style of behaviour brought him into disrepute. This is a garbled version of what happened before and after Stalin's death. There was never a secret about the forced- labour system in the USSR, and when the cold war erupted after the second world war, plenty of politicians and writers castigated the Soviet order. Not only Harry Truman and Winston Churchill but also George Orwell and Arthur Koestler indicted the terrorist dictatorship in the USSR. Fellow travellers certainly existed. But the situation was complex and ever-changing and it is a pity that Applebaum has repeated a solecism that has become widespread since the fall of communism in Europe. While Applebaum is correct in emphasising economics, she might have given more weight to politics. Stalin's propaganda left no doubt about who dominated Soviet politics. The corollary was that the vast strata of society which had been hurt by state policies knew exactly whom to blame. His campaign of repression, therefore, had a rational basis. Certainly the arrests were arbitrary in the sense that the police picked up millions of people who bore no grudge against him or his regime. But this happened mainly because the Soviet state, including its police, was worse informed and equipped than [Adolf Hitler]'s security agencies in Germany; and the NKVD had to meet the quotas set in the Kremlin regardless of individual guilt or innocence. Nevertheless, Stalin really did have millions of enemies: former Bolshevik oppositionists, priests, ex-Mensheviks, nationalists, kulaks and traders. Deporting all of them to Turkey, as was done with Trotsky in 1929, was impractical. Nor was it safe to dump them unguarded in remote towns of the USSR. Since even Stalin did not see the point of universal extermination, the gulag was his alternative. - Robert Service.
Kirkus Review
A searing, engrossing history of the most extensive, longest-lived experiment in "rationalized evil" the world has ever known. From 1929 to 1953--the years in which Josef Stalin ruled the Soviet Union--at least 18 million people passed through the massive penal and slave-labor system known as the Gulag. Though that system had antecedents in tsarist Russian, former Economist correspondent Applebaum writes, it took Stalin to shape the Gulag into an enormous machine; Stalin believed, she asserts, that "the Gulag was critical to Soviet economic growth," offering an endless source of free labor to the state. Stalin's successors, however, saw it as "a source of backwardness and distorted investment," and within days of Stalin's death began to dismantle the most infamous camps--though not before untold millions had died within them. Applebaum (Between East and West, 1994) charts the inception and development of the Gulag, showing how it served to channel the millions of deportees during the famines of the 1920s and '30s, the victims of political purges before WWII, and whole nations--including the Chechens and Tartars--during the war against Germany. Drawing on accounts by survivors, she also documents daily life inside the Gulag, a Dante-esque existence of individual rituals in the face of death: "Never on any account take more than a half-hour to consume your ration," one such account warns. "Every bite of bread should be chewed thoroughly. . . . Eat it all at one sitting; if, on the other hand, you gobble it down too quickly, as famished people often do in normal circumstances, you will also shorten your days." Throughout, Applebaum's account runs a large question: Why did the West do nothing about the Gulag, even though its existence and the reality of other Soviet crimes against humanity were well known? Perhaps because we can't admit that we allied ourselves with one mass murderer to battle another. But, she adds in closing, we had better not deny such crimes the next time they occur--as they certainly will. Extraordinary in its range and lucidity: a most welcome companion to Bernard-Henri Levi's Barbarism With a Human Face, Robert Conquest's The Great Terror, and, of course, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Subsequent to Solzhenitsyn's landmark Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Applebaun, former Warsaw correspondent for the Economist and currently on the editorial staff at the Washington Post, has captured the full brutality and economic engine for the Soviet state that was the Gulag prison system. This book is perfectly timed to follow such recent works as Golfo Alexopoulos's Stalin's Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State 1926-1936. With a finely honed writer's skill, Applebaum thoroughly describes in minute detail the system of camps, the prisoners, camp administration, camp life, and Stalin's obsession with slave labor. "GULAG is an acronym, meaning Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration. Over time, the word `Gulag' has also come to signify not only the administration of the concentration camps but also the system of Soviet slave labor itself." Intellectually, Americans and Western Europeans know roughly what happened in the Soviet Union, but the crimes of Stalin do not inspire the same visceral reaction as do the crimes of the Third Reich. This first complete history of the Gulag system not only points out the similarities with the Nazis and their concentration camps but also puts Stalin and his Gulag on the same ghastly level. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/02.]-Harry Willems, Southeast Kansas Lib. Syst., Iola (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 BOLSHEVIK BEGINNINGS But your spine has been smashed, My beautiful, pitiful era, And with an inane smile You look back, cruel and weak, Like an animal past its prime, At the prints of your own paws. --osip mandelstam, "Vek" One of my goals is to destroy the myth that the cruelest era of repression began in 1936-37. I think that in future, statistics will show that the wave of arrests, sentences and exile had already begun at the beginning of 1918, even before the official declaration, that autumn, of the "Red Terror." From that moment, the wave simply grew larger and larger, until the death of Stalin . . . --dmitrii likhachev, Vospominaniya In the year 1917, two waves of revolution rolled across Russia, sweeping Imperial Russian society aside as if it were destroying so many houses of cards. After Czar Nicholas II abdicated in February, events proved extremely difficult for anyone to halt or control. Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the first post-revolutionary Provisional Government, later wrote that, in the void following the collapse of the old regime, "all existing political and tactical programs, however bold and well conceived, appeared hanging aimlessly and uselessly in space." But although the Provisional Government was weak, although popular dissatisfaction was widespread, although anger at the carnage caused by the First World War ran high, few expected power to fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks, one of several radical socialist parties agitating for even more rapid change. Abroad, the Bolsheviks were scarcely known. One apocryphal tale illustrates foreign attitudes very well: in 1917, so the story goes, a bureaucrat rushed into the office of the Austrian Foreign Minister, shouting, "Your Excellency, there has been a revolution in Russia!" The minister snorted. "Who could make a revolution in Russia? Surely not harmless Herr Trotsky, down at the Cafe Central?" If the nature of the Bolsheviks was mysterious, their leader, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov--the man the world would come to know by his revolutionary pseudonym, "Lenin"--was even more so. During his many years as an emigre revolutionary, Lenin had been recognized for his brilliance, but also disliked for his intemperance and his factionalism. He picked frequent fights with other socialist leaders, and had a penchant for turning minor disagreements over seemingly irrelevant matters of dogma into major arguments. In the first months following the February Revolution, Lenin was very far from holding a position of unchallenged authority, even within his own Party. As late as mid-October 1917, a handful of leading Bolsheviks continued to oppose his plan to carry out a coup d'etat against the Provisional Government, arguing that the Party was unprepared to take power, and that it did not yet have popular support. He won the argument, however, and on October 25 the coup took place. Under the influence of Lenin's agitation, a mob sacked the Winter Palace. The Bolsheviks arrested the ministers of the Provisional Government. Within hours, Lenin had become the leader of the country he renamed Soviet Russia. Yet although Lenin had succeeded in taking power, his Bolshevik critics had not been entirely wrong. The Bolsheviks were indeed wildly unprepared. As a result, most of their early decisions, including the creation of the one-party state, were taken to suit the needs of the moment. Their popular support was indeed weak, and almost immediately they began to wage a bloody civil war, simply in order to stay in power. From 1918, when the White Army of the old regime regrouped to fight the new Red Army--led by Lenin's comrade, "Herr Trotsky" from the "Cafe Central"--some of the most brutal fighting ever seen in Europe raged across the Russian countryside. Nor did all of the violence take place in battlefields. The Bolsheviks went out of their way to quash intellectual and political opposition in any form it took, attacking not only the representatives of the old regime but also other socialists: Mensheviks, Anarchists, Social Revolutionaries. The new Soviet state would not know relative peace until 1921. Against this background of improvisation and violence, the first Soviet labor camps were born. Like so many other Bolshevik institutions, they were created ad hoc, in a hurry, as an emergency measure in the heat of the civil war. This is not to say the idea had no prior appeal. Three weeks before the October Revolution, Lenin himself was already sketching out an admittedly vague plan to organize "obligatory work duty" for wealthy capitalists. By January 1918, angered by the depth of the anti-Bolshevik resistance, he was even more vehement, writing that he welcomed "the arrest of millionaire-saboteurs traveling in first- and second-class train compartments. I suggest sentencing them to half a year's forced labor in a mine." Lenin's vision of labor camps as a special form of punishment for a particular sort of bourgeois "enemy" sat well with his other beliefs about crime and criminals. On the one hand, the first Soviet leader felt ambivalent about the jailing and punishment of traditional criminals--thieves, pickpockets, murderers--whom he perceived as potential allies. In his view, the basic cause of "social excess" (meaning crime) was "the exploitation of the masses." The removal of the cause, he believed, "will lead to the withering away of the excess." No special punishments were therefore necessary to deter criminals: in time, the Revolution itself would do away with them. Some of the language in the Bolsheviks' first criminal code would have thus warmed the hearts of the most radical, progressive criminal reformers in the West. Among other things, the code decreed that there was "no such thing as individual guilt," and that punishment "should not be seen as retribution." On the other hand, Lenin--like the Bolshevik legal theorists who followed in his wake--also reckoned that the creation of the Soviet state would create a new kind of criminal: the "class enemy." A class enemy opposed the Revolution, and worked openly, or more often secretly, to destroy it. The class enemy was harder to identify than an ordinary criminal, and much harder to reform. Unlike an ordinary criminal, a class enemy could never be trusted to cooperate with the Soviet regime, and required harsher punishment than would an ordinary murderer or thief. Thus in May 1918, the first Bolshevik "decree on bribery" declared that: "If the person guilty of taking or offering bribes belongs to the propertied classes and is using the bribe to preserve or acquire privileges, linked to property rights, then he should be sentenced to the harshest and most unpleasant forced labor and all of his property should be confiscated." From the very earliest days of the new Soviet state, in other words, people were to be sentenced not for what they had done, but for who they were. Unfortunately, nobody ever provided a clear description of what, exactly, a "class enemy" was supposed to look like. As a result, arrests of all sorts increased dramatically in the wake of the Bolshevik coup. From November 1917, revolutionary tribunals, composed of random "supporters" of the Revolution, began convicting random "enemies" of the Revolution. Prison sentences, forced-labor terms, and even capital punishment were arbitrarily meted out to bankers, to merchants' wives, to "speculators"--meaning anyone engaged in independent economic activity--to former Czarist-era prison warders and to anyone else who seemed suspicious. The definition of who was and who was not an "enemy" also varied from place to place, sometimes overlapping with the definition of "prisoner of war." Upon occupying a new city, Trotsky's Red Army frequently took bourgeois hostages, who could be shot in case the White Army returned, as it often did along the fluctuating lines of the front. In the interim they could be made to do forced labor, often digging trenches and building barricades. The distinction between political prisoners and common criminals was equally arbitrary. The uneducated members of the temporary commissions and revolutionary tribunals might, for example, suddenly decide that a man caught riding a tram without a ticket had offended society, and sentence him for political crimes. In the end, many such decisions were left up to the policeman or soldiers doing the arresting. Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka--Lenin's secret police, the forerunner of the KGB--personally kept a little black notebook in which he scribbled down the names and addresses of random "enemies" he came across while doing his job. These distinctions would remain vague right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, eighty years later. Nevertheless, the existence of two categories of prisoner--"political" and "criminal"--had a profound effect on the formation of the Soviet penal system. During the first decade of Bolshevik rule, Soviet penitentiaries even split into two categories, one for each type of prisoner. The split arose spontaneously, as a reaction to the chaos of the existing prison system. In the very early days of the Revolution, all prisoners were incarcerated under the jurisdiction of the "traditional" judicial ministries, first the Commissariat of Justice, later the Commissariat of the Interior, and placed in the "ordinary" prison system. That is, they were thrown into the remnants of the Czarist system, usually into the dirty, gloomy stone prisons which occupied a central position in every major town. During the revolutionary years of 1917 to 1920, these institutions were in total disarray. Mobs had stormed the jails, self-appointed commissars had sacked the guards, prisoners had received wide-ranging amnesties or had simply walked away. By the time the Bolsheviks took charge, the few prisons that remained in operation were overcrowded and inadequate. Only weeks after the Revolution, Lenin himself demanded "extreme measures for the immediate improvement of food supplies to the Petrograd prisons." A few months later, a member of the Moscow Cheka visited the city's Taganskaya prison and reported "terrible cold and filth," as well as typhus and hunger. Most of the prisoners could not carry out their forced-labor sentences because they had no clothes. A newspaper report claimed that Butyrka prison in Moscow, designed to hold 1,000 prisoners, already contained 2,500. Another newspaper complained that the Red Guards "unsystematically arrest hundreds of people every day, and then don't know what to do with them." Overcrowding led to "creative" solutions. Lacking anything better, the new authorities incarcerated prisoners in basements, attics, empty palaces, and old churches. One survivor later remembered being placed in the cellar of a deserted house, in a single room with fifty people, no furniture, and little food: those who did not get packages from their families simply starved. In December 1917, a Cheka commission discussed the fate of fifty-six assorted prisoners--"thieves, drunks and various 'politicals' "--who were being kept in the basement of the Smolny Institute, Lenin's headquarters in Petrograd. Not everyone suffered from the chaotic conditions. Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British diplomat accused of spying (accurately, as it happened), was imprisoned in 1918 in a room in the Kremlin. He occupied himself playing Patience, and reading Thucydides and Carlyle. From time to time, a former imperial servant brought him hot tea and newspapers. But even in the remaining traditional jails, prison regimes were erratic, and prison wardens were inexperienced. A prisoner in the northern Russian city of Vyborg discovered that, in the topsy-turvy post-revolutionary world, his former chauffeur had become a prison guard. The man was delighted to help his former master move to a better, drier cell, and eventually to escape. One White Army colonel also recalled that in the Petrograd prison in December 1917 prisoners came and left at will, while homeless people slept in the cells at night. Looking back on this era, one Soviet official remembered that "the only people who didn't escape were those who were too lazy." The disarray forced the Cheka to come up with new solutions: the Bolsheviks could hardly allow their "real" enemies to enter the ordinary prison system. Chaotic jails and lazy guards might be suitable for pickpockets and juvenile delinquents, but for the saboteurs, parasites, speculators, White Army officers, priests, bourgeois capitalists, and others who loomed so large in the Bolshevik imagination, more creative solutions were needed. A solution was found as early as June 4, 1918, Trotsky called for a group of unruly Czech war prisoners to be pacified, disarmed, and placed in a kontslager: a concentration camp. Twelve days later, in a memorandum addressed to the Soviet government Trotsky again spoke of concentration camps, outdoor prisons in which "the city and village bourgeoisie . . . shall be mobilized and organized into rear-service battalions to do menial work (cleaning barracks, camps, streets, digging trenches, etc.). Those refusing will be fined, and held under arrest until the fine is paid." In August, Lenin made use of the term as well. In a telegram to the commissars of Penza, site of an anti-Bolshevik uprising, he called for "mass terror against the kulaks [rich peasants], priests and White Guards" and for the "unreliable" to be "locked up in a concentration camp outside town." The facilities were already in place. During the summer of 1918--in the wake of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty which ended Russia's participation in the First World War--the regime freed two million war prisoners. The empty camps were immediately turned over to the Cheka. At the time, the Cheka must have seemed the ideal body to take over the task of incarcerating "enemies" in "special" camps. A completely new organization, the Cheka was designed to be the "sword and shield" of the Communist Party, and had no allegiance to the official Soviet government or any of its departments. It had no traditions of legality, no obligation to obey the rule of law, no need to consult with the police or the courts or the Commissar of Justice. Its very name spoke of its special status: the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage--or, using the Russian abbreviation for "Extraordinary Commission"--the Ch-K, or Cheka. It was "extraordinary" precisely because it existed outside of "ordinary" legality. Almost as soon as it was created, the Cheka was given an extraordinary task to carry out. On September 5, 1918, Dzerzhinsky was directed to implement Lenin's policy of Red Terror. Launched in the wake of an assassination attempt on Lenin's life, this wave of terror--arrests, imprisonments, murders--more organized than the random terror of the previous months, was in fact an important component of the civil war, directed against those suspected of working to destroy the Revolution on the "home front." It was bloody, it was merciless, and it was cruel--as its perpetrators wanted it to be. Krasnaya Gazeta, the organ of the Red Army, described it: "Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin . . . let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie--more blood, as much as possible . . ." The Red Terror was crucial to Lenin's struggle for power. Concentration camps, the so-called "special camps," were crucial to the Red Terror. They were mentioned in the very first decree on Red Terror, which called not only for the arrest and incarceration of "important representatives of the bourgeoisie, landowners, industrialists, merchants, counter-revolutionary priests, anti-Soviet officers" but also for their "isolation in concentration camps." Although there are no reliable figures for numbers of prisoners, by the end of 1919 there were twenty-one registered camps in Russia. At the end of 1920 there were 107, five times as many. Excerpted from Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.