A review by tittypete
Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum

4.0

I’m a glutton for punishment and/or clarity. See, I recently wrapped up reading all three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago. So I got whole gob of Gulag. But maybe because it was so long and not super straightforward that I felt like I didn’t really get a clear picture.

So this book, written by a woman academic that didn’t get put in a prison camp served as a tight little 700 page summary of the aforementioned 1800+ page ‘experiment in literary investigation. Written with considerably less Slavic pizzazz, this Gulag book gave me a lengthy look at the clear picture I was craving.

Folks, this book has it all when it comes to Russian forced labor prison sadness. You’ve got your humble beginnings during Tsarist times when the Bolsheviks were victims. You’ve got your senseless canal-building, great terror, mass arrests, your show trials and your frozen human waste coated cattle car transport. Want death? There’s so much death. Execution death, escape death, starving death, starving and going crazy death, inmate fight death and self-self-inflicted death. And there’s work too! Logging, digging, uranium mining, untrained doctoring, and burying. It’s cold. There’s improper clothing. Ordinary criminals are always trying to buttsex the softy political prisoners. Tattoos of vaginas on faces and tattoos of pro and anti-socialist slogans on faces. Everybody is miserable and there’s so many of them.

There were dudes and kids and women and it sucked really badly for them all. People eat glass, swallow spoons and nail their ball-bags to boards because those things were less worse than going to work.

In the end it didn’t turn out to be the economic boon it was meant to and seemed to have genuinely fucked up the Russian psyche even more. These are some cold blooded lizard people now and the authors kinda implies that they’re sort of indifferent about the whole thing. But now they’re winning, so why should they live in the past, amirite?