Gulag

A 500-page history of one of the most repressive prison camp systems of the twentieth century may not seem like your idea of an uplifting read, but the inhumanity of the sytem is more than matched by the humanity of Anne Applebaum's writing.

The acronym GULAG means, prosaically, Main Camp Administration, but of course it has come to symbolise in its entirety the system of prisons and industrial camps that were scattered across the most inhospitable regions of the Soviet Union. The Nazi concentration camps may have exhibited a greater fascination upon the imagination, but the horrors of the German lagers took place over a much shorter period of time. In stark contrast, as this book amply and painstakingly explains, the Soviet system initially came into being in the 1920s, but it wasn't until February 1992 that the last camps were finally closed for good.

Throughout this long period, the raison d'etre of the camps altered. The early prisons, in particular the notorious camp on the White Sea island of Solovetsky, were renowned for the sadistic and random cruelty that was meted out to the prisoners. It soon became apparent to the Bolshevik authorities, however, that - and here is a great irony of the system - these camps were not paying for themselves. From this time onwards, an economic imperative took hold; ironically, in spite of the meagre rations doled out to prisoners, camp commandants wanted their workers alive.

As the Gulag expanded across the Arctic circle and into arid Kazakhstan,  greater and greater numbers of prisoners were required to provide slave labour to drive the Soviet economy. Official NKVD (secret police) statistics state, for example, that there were 2.5 million inmates in camps or exiled to colonies by the mid-1950s, but as Applebaum points out, this figure does not take into accout turnover of prisoners.

As time went on, and Stalin became more paranoid, comrades were arrested for increasingly spurious reasons. Applebaum uses the captives' own words to describe the generally appalling living conditions and rations they experienced, the illogical work regimes under which they had to toil, and the in-built violence of the regime. However, she also cites examples of less-bad camps, run by more-humane guards; she quotes numerous examples of camaraderie among prisoners, and the ingenious techniques they used to stay alive. In the final, collapsing years of the camps, they even acquired a degree of power, holding hunger strikes that were widely reported in the West.

Certainly it is impossible to forget that millions of innocent people perished, but it is the stories of humanity in the face of unbelievable brutality that make Gulag such a moving book. Applebaum's objective and thorough study gives dignity to those that suffered and brings the reader closer to an understanding of the madness and terror that gripped the Soviet Union for so long. In a passionate epilogue she implores us - and the people of the disintegrated USSR - not to forget what happened, for otherwise 'it almost certainly will happen again'.