Aug 28, 2006 12:09 AM
2249 Views
(Updated Aug 28, 2006 12:20 AM)
I started reading Gulag - A History (GAH) because of two things:
· It was highly recommended by my brother Ismail, my very intelligent brother with a keen interest in history.
· I’d given him two rather precious books of mine to keep him company on his long flight to somewhere on the other side of Earth (out of the goodness of my heart). In exchange I wanted something (I’m still good at heart!!). Apparently my two books were worth one Gulag. Go figure…
For those of you unaware, Gulag is an acronym for Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei, which, in people speak connotes the Soviet Labor Camp System. An American woman called Anne Applebaum set out on an ambitious project of revealing to the world that Hitler was not the only one who made use of concentration camps. The difference seems to be that the object of the former was economic benefit (which is why they are referred to as labor camps throughout the book) and that of the latter was ethnic cleansing.
GAH starts out with a very interesting introduction, but it’s mostly downhill from there. A detailed account of how the camp system started; how and why people were arrested (The USSR government seemed to follow no consistent pattern with regard to its enemy – it was the foreigners one time, the person who’d made an unfortunate joke within ear shot of his spy neighbor the next, sometimes even hard core communists themselves who hadn’t pledged allegiance to new regime); how they struggled to survive with their limited food rations, unsympathetic guards, regulated life, harsh climatic conditions and disease; the downfall of the Gulag system (the Zek’s revolted sometime after the death of Stalin. Zek - prisoner); and how the prisoners got integrated into normal society again etc.
What I found particularly touching were the poems taken from the journals of Zek’s that each chapter starts with. This is just an example:
“…the prisoner who was our barrack orderly greeted me with a cry: ‘Run and see what’s under your pillow!’
My heart leaped: perhaps I’d got my bread ration after all!
I ran to the bed and threw off the pillow. Under it lay three letters from home, three whole letters! It was six months since I’d received anything at all.
My first reaction on seeing them was acute disappointment.
And then – horror.
What had become of me if a piece of bread was worth more to me than letters from my mother, my father, my children…I forgot all about the bread and wept.
- Olga Adamova-Sliozberg”
Irony - Enterprising government officials tried every trick in the book to make the camps as self sufficient at first, then started making profits at the cost of human dignity of the millions that passed through the Gulag system. They invented a food for work scheme where Zek’s were given food rations based on their productivity. So in effect the old and diseased disintegrated because of lack of food and the healthy and young grew healthier as a result of good food and exercise. (Sounds very much like the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer in under the Capitalist economy doesn’t it?) COMMUNISM…what a joke…
Interesting facts – The KGB is actually the re-Christened Gulag administration! The Zek's were made to work in every industry imaginable (forestry, mining etc.), most times running other government owned enterprises that didn't have the advantage of dirt cheap labor out of business!
Anne Applebaum did an admirable job of presenting the facts without passing judgment, although it was not have been out of place if she would have condemned the system.
The book is very well researched and I’d recommend it to serious history buffs only.
