Introduction

2004 Pulitzer Prize Winner, General Non-Fiction. The Gulag entered the world's historical consciousness in 1972, with the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's epic history of the Soviet camps, "The Gulag Archipelago." Applebaum has undertaken a fully documented history of the Soviet camp system, from its origins in the Russian Revolution to its collapse in the era of glasnost. Two 16 page photo inserts.

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Excerpt

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 . . . ... view entire excerpt...

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