Gulag by Anne Applebaum Read Free Book Online Page B

camps, at certain times, death was virtually guaranteed for those selected to cut trees in the winter forest or to work in the worst of the Kolyma gold mines. Prisoners were also locked in punishment cells until they died of cold and starvation, left untreated in unheated hospitals, or simply shot at will for “attempted escape.” Nevertheless, the Soviet camp system as a whole was not deliberately organized to mass-produce corpses—even if, at times, it did.
    These are fine distinctions, but they matter. Although the Gulag and Auschwitz do belong to the same intellectual and historical tradition, they are nevertheless separate and distinct, both from one another and from camp systems set up by other regimes. The idea of the concentration camp may be general enough to be used in many different cultures and situations, but even a superficial study of the concentration camp’s cross-cultural history reveals that the specific details—how life in the camps was organized, how the camps developed over time, how rigid or disorganized they became, how cruel or liberal they remained—depended on the particular country, on the culture, and on the regime. 58 To those who were trapped behind barbed wire, these details were critical to their life, health, and survival.
    In fact, reading the accounts of those who survived both, one is struck more by the differences between the victims’ experiences than by the differences between the two camp systems. Each tale has its own unique qualities, each camp held different sorts of horrors for people of different characters. In Germany you could die of cruelty, in Russia you could die of despair. In Auschwitz you could die in a gas chamber, in Kolyma you could freeze to death in the snow. You could die in a German forest or a Siberian waste-land, you could die in a mining accident or you could die in a cattle train. But in the end, the story of your life was your own.

PART ONE

    THE ORIGINS OF THE GULAG, 1917—1939

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” 1
    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 . . .
    —Dmitri Likhachev, Vospominaniya 2
    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.” 3
    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 Café Central?”
    If the nature of the Bolsheviks was mysterious,