The First Guidebook To Prisons And Concentration Camps Of The Soviet Union

Describes and provides the location of prisons, concentration camps, and psychiatric prisons in each region of the U.S.S.R., and includes accounts of the prisoners' treatment

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • This magisterial and acclaimed history offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost. “A tragic testimony to how evil ideologically inspired dictatorships can be.” –The New York Times The Gulag—a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners—was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history of the Soviet Union. Immediately recognized as a landmark and long-overdue work of scholarship, Gulag is an essential book for anyone who wishes to understand the history of the twentieth century.

A vast network of prison camps was an essential part of the Stalinist system. Conditions in the camps were brutal, life expectancy short. At their peak, they housed millions, and hardly an individual in the Soviet Union remained untouched by their tentacles. Michael Jakobson's is the first study to examine the most crucial period in the history of the camps: from the October Revolution of 1917, when the tsarist prison system was destroyed to October 1934, when all places of confinement were consolidated under one agency -- the infamous GULAG. The prison camps served the Soviet government in many ways: to isolate opponents and frighten the population into submission, to increase labor productivity through the arrest of "inefficient" workers, and to provide labor for factories, mines, lumbering, and construction projects. Jakobson focuses on the structure and interrelations of prison agencies, the Bolshevik views of crime and punishment and inmate reeducation, and prison self-sufficiency. He also describes how political conditions and competition among prison agencies contributed to an unprecedented expansion of the system. Finally, he disputes the official claim of 1931 that the system was profitable -- a claim long accepted by former inmates and Western researchers and used to explain the proliferation of the camps and their population. Did Marxism or the Bolshevik Revolution or Leninism inexorably lead to the GULAG system? Were its origins truly evil or merely banal? Jakobson's important book probes the official record to cast new light on a system that for a time supported but ultimately helped destroy the now fallen Soviet colossus.

The shocking and absorbing account of life in the hell of the Soviet Gulag system is told in all his horrific details here by Elinor Lipper. “IN THIS BOOK I have described my personal experiences only to the extent that they were the characteristic experiences of a prisoner in the Soviet Union. For my concern is not primarily with the foreigners in Soviet camps; it is rather with the fate of all the peoples who have been subjugated by the Soviet regime, who were born in a Soviet Republic and cannot escape from it. The events I describe are the daily experiences of thousands or people in the Soviet Union. They are the findings of an involuntary expedition into an unknown land: the land of Soviet prisoners, of the guiltless damned. From that region I have brought back with me the silence of the Siberian graveyards, the deathly silence of those who have frozen, starved, or been beaten to death. This book is an attempt to make that silence speak.”-from the Author’s Preface.

"I tell my own story because I believe that only in this way can I discharge the moral obligation which a kindly Fate imposed upon me in helping me to escape from the Soviet Terror the duty to speak for those whose voices cannot be heard.In silence they are sent away as convicts to the concentration camps; in silence they suffer torture and go to meet their death from Soviet bullets.Nothing is invented in this book and I stand back of every statement I have made. In a few instances to protect others I have been compelled to conceal the identity of certain people, but I have indicated that fact in each specific case. All those whom I describe are real persons and everything is true to the minutest detail.This is a narrative of what befell a Russian scientist under the Soviet regime. More than that, it is the story of many, if not most, people of education in the U.S.S.R. today.As you read, please remember that I speak of myself only because it enables me to tell the story of others. Remember, also, that, in the Soviet Union, innocent people are still being tried for "wrecking" and that intelligent men are still being forced by torture to "confess" to crimes which they never committed.Remember, too, that thousands of Russian men and women of education are still languishing in the filthy cells of the GPU prisons and in the cold barracks of the concentration camps, poorly clad and starving, breaking with exhaustion under the hardships of inhuman slavery."Vladimir V. TchernavinVladimir Vyacheslavovich Tchernavin (alternative transliteration: Chernavin) (1887-1949) was a Russian-born ichthyologist who became famous as one of the first and few prisoners of the Soviet Gulag system who managed to escape abroad.