--- product_id: 8166030 title: "Gulag (Pulitzer Prize Winner): A History" price: "€ 38.95" currency: EUR in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.es/products/8166030-gulag-pulitzer-prize-winner-a-history store_origin: ES region: Spain --- # Gulag (Pulitzer Prize Winner): A History **Price:** € 38.95 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** Gulag (Pulitzer Prize Winner): A History - **How much does it cost?** € 38.95 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.es](https://www.desertcart.es/products/8166030-gulag-pulitzer-prize-winner-a-history) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description 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 A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century 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. Review: Sent out to Siberia - Applebaum's work is a broad overview of the Gulag system and the politics that drove it. Considering the immensity, the author has done well in style, technique and substance to pull back the veil on a system of human aberrance so huge that it has no peers in recent history. But it is difficult to review this book fairly due to it's content. For those knowing names and having photos of individuals lost to this maw of human depravity there can be no enjoyment here. For them, this is a terrible, terrible book confirming the worst whispers and imaginings of what `being sent to Siberia' was really like. A ghastly book exposing the worst kinds of assault on human dignity even beyond the mass slaughters of the Katina woods or Hitler's ovens. It's victims were tortured, starved, dehumanized in the most perverse ways imaginable to not only eliminate them as hurdles to central planning but intentionally squeeze from them their last drops of blood. Many luckily died much before, but that does not change intent. The only redeeming value in Applebaum's book is the exposure to drive assurance that such inhumanity never plagues our species again. But of course, it is ongoing in other hell holes at this very time. Such being the secret inner working of totalitarians who by necessity must find venues of disposal of it's human waste. Waste being opponents, whether individuals, tribes, or whole countries that do not fit utopia's mold. Or, as Applebaum reveals, merely foils to divert attention from the systemic and abject conditions visited on the working class by it's overlord central planners. I read this book not for entertainment but to better understand what happened to those left in Eastern Europe after the Nazism took it's first cut. One person looking back to discover the desecration of his family tree and his ethnic inheritance. But imagine the disappointment to discover that "Gulags" were too good for any other than Russia's own 30 million. Eastern Europeans, as it turns out, were cast into even lower levels of hells reserved especially for them in elsewhere's unknown. It is absolutely mind boggling to multiply my familial losses, illness to the escapees and even after-affects to progeny, by 30 million. But apparently those numbers do not suffice. For even now the public record is incomplete as to other administrative compartments, categories and hells that might have been, or are still ongoing, to serve as gear-works for the machines of totalitarianism. It is a commendable book that serves it's topic well. If you are compelled to read and discover, do so. But I cannot imagine anyone having any morsel of compassion or empathy for the human soul enjoying the reading of these words. Review: This Terrific Book WIll Become The Standard Bearer! - With the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago" in the early 1970s, Alexander Solzhenitsyn shocked and dismayed the Western world by masterfully detailing the existence of a horrific shadow culture within the Soviet Union, a culture comprised of a mass society of slave laborers scratching out their bare-knuckled survival in unbelievable difficulty and squalor, and having been recruited into the Gulag for a variety of economic, social, and political reasons. Given the inherent limitations of this superb albeit shocking work, the West had to wait for the fall of the Soviet bloc for a more definitive and more complete treatise on the nature of the Gulag. This new book by scholar-turned-journalist Anne Applebaum represents such a work. The work is both massive and comprehensive, dealing not only with the ways in which the Gulag came into existence and then thrived under the active sponsorship of Lenin and Stalin, but also with a plethora of aspects of life within the Gulag, ranging from its laws, customs, folklore, and morality on the one hand to its slang, sexual mores, and cuisine on the other. She looks at the prisoners themselves and how they interacted with each other to the relationships between the prisoners and the many sorts of guards and jailers that kept them imprisoned. For what forced the Gulag into becoming a more or less permanent fixture within the Soviet system was its value economically in producing goods and services that were marketable both within the larger Soviet economy as well as in international trade. As it does in China today, forced labor within the Gulag for the Soviets represented a key element in expanding markets for Soviet-made goods ranging from lamps to those prototypically Russian fur hats. The Gulag came into being as a result of the Communist elite's burning desire for purges of remaining vestiges of bourgeoisie aspects of Soviet culture, and its consequent need for some deep dark hole to stick unlucky cultural offenders into to remove them semi-permanently from the forefront of the Soviet society. Stalin found it useful to expand the uses of the camp system to enhance industrial growth, and the camps became flooded with millions of Soviets found wanting in terms of their ultimate suitability for everyday life in the workers' paradise. Thus, the Gulag flourished throughout the 1920s and 1930s and even through the years of WWII, when slave labor provided an invaluable aid in producing enough war goods to help defeat the Axis powers. By the peak years of Gulag culture in the 1950s, the archipelago stretched into all twelve of the U.S. S. R.'s time zones, although it was largely concentrated in the northernmost and least livable aspects of the country's vast geographical areas. One of the most interesting and certainly more controversial aspects of the book can be found in its consideration of the relative obscurity with which both the existence and horrors associated with the Gulag has been treated to date. Compared to the much more extensively researched and discussed Holocaust of Europe's Jewish population perpetrated by the Nazi Third Reich over a twelve year period, almost nothing is known about the nearly seventy reign of the Gulag. Given the fairly recent demise of the Soviet state, and the dawning availability of data revealing the particulars of the existence of the Soviet system of political imprisonment, forced labor camps, and summary executions, one expects this massively documented, exhaustively detailed, and memorably written work will serve as the standard in the field for decades to come. This is a terrific book, and one I can heartily recommend to any serious student of 20th century history. Enjoy! ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #38,007 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #17 in Russian History (Books) #41 in Communism & Socialism (Books) #73 in Criminology (Books) | | Customer Reviews | 4.6 out of 5 stars 1,951 Reviews | ## Images ![Gulag (Pulitzer Prize Winner): A History - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61H2yQKoHoL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Sent out to Siberia *by V***S on May 2, 2013* Applebaum's work is a broad overview of the Gulag system and the politics that drove it. Considering the immensity, the author has done well in style, technique and substance to pull back the veil on a system of human aberrance so huge that it has no peers in recent history. But it is difficult to review this book fairly due to it's content. For those knowing names and having photos of individuals lost to this maw of human depravity there can be no enjoyment here. For them, this is a terrible, terrible book confirming the worst whispers and imaginings of what `being sent to Siberia' was really like. A ghastly book exposing the worst kinds of assault on human dignity even beyond the mass slaughters of the Katina woods or Hitler's ovens. It's victims were tortured, starved, dehumanized in the most perverse ways imaginable to not only eliminate them as hurdles to central planning but intentionally squeeze from them their last drops of blood. Many luckily died much before, but that does not change intent. The only redeeming value in Applebaum's book is the exposure to drive assurance that such inhumanity never plagues our species again. But of course, it is ongoing in other hell holes at this very time. Such being the secret inner working of totalitarians who by necessity must find venues of disposal of it's human waste. Waste being opponents, whether individuals, tribes, or whole countries that do not fit utopia's mold. Or, as Applebaum reveals, merely foils to divert attention from the systemic and abject conditions visited on the working class by it's overlord central planners. I read this book not for entertainment but to better understand what happened to those left in Eastern Europe after the Nazism took it's first cut. One person looking back to discover the desecration of his family tree and his ethnic inheritance. But imagine the disappointment to discover that "Gulags" were too good for any other than Russia's own 30 million. Eastern Europeans, as it turns out, were cast into even lower levels of hells reserved especially for them in elsewhere's unknown. It is absolutely mind boggling to multiply my familial losses, illness to the escapees and even after-affects to progeny, by 30 million. But apparently those numbers do not suffice. For even now the public record is incomplete as to other administrative compartments, categories and hells that might have been, or are still ongoing, to serve as gear-works for the machines of totalitarianism. It is a commendable book that serves it's topic well. If you are compelled to read and discover, do so. But I cannot imagine anyone having any morsel of compassion or empathy for the human soul enjoying the reading of these words. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ This Terrific Book WIll Become The Standard Bearer! *by B***K on June 4, 2003* With the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago" in the early 1970s, Alexander Solzhenitsyn shocked and dismayed the Western world by masterfully detailing the existence of a horrific shadow culture within the Soviet Union, a culture comprised of a mass society of slave laborers scratching out their bare-knuckled survival in unbelievable difficulty and squalor, and having been recruited into the Gulag for a variety of economic, social, and political reasons. Given the inherent limitations of this superb albeit shocking work, the West had to wait for the fall of the Soviet bloc for a more definitive and more complete treatise on the nature of the Gulag. This new book by scholar-turned-journalist Anne Applebaum represents such a work. The work is both massive and comprehensive, dealing not only with the ways in which the Gulag came into existence and then thrived under the active sponsorship of Lenin and Stalin, but also with a plethora of aspects of life within the Gulag, ranging from its laws, customs, folklore, and morality on the one hand to its slang, sexual mores, and cuisine on the other. She looks at the prisoners themselves and how they interacted with each other to the relationships between the prisoners and the many sorts of guards and jailers that kept them imprisoned. For what forced the Gulag into becoming a more or less permanent fixture within the Soviet system was its value economically in producing goods and services that were marketable both within the larger Soviet economy as well as in international trade. As it does in China today, forced labor within the Gulag for the Soviets represented a key element in expanding markets for Soviet-made goods ranging from lamps to those prototypically Russian fur hats. The Gulag came into being as a result of the Communist elite's burning desire for purges of remaining vestiges of bourgeoisie aspects of Soviet culture, and its consequent need for some deep dark hole to stick unlucky cultural offenders into to remove them semi-permanently from the forefront of the Soviet society. Stalin found it useful to expand the uses of the camp system to enhance industrial growth, and the camps became flooded with millions of Soviets found wanting in terms of their ultimate suitability for everyday life in the workers' paradise. Thus, the Gulag flourished throughout the 1920s and 1930s and even through the years of WWII, when slave labor provided an invaluable aid in producing enough war goods to help defeat the Axis powers. By the peak years of Gulag culture in the 1950s, the archipelago stretched into all twelve of the U.S. S. R.'s time zones, although it was largely concentrated in the northernmost and least livable aspects of the country's vast geographical areas. One of the most interesting and certainly more controversial aspects of the book can be found in its consideration of the relative obscurity with which both the existence and horrors associated with the Gulag has been treated to date. Compared to the much more extensively researched and discussed Holocaust of Europe's Jewish population perpetrated by the Nazi Third Reich over a twelve year period, almost nothing is known about the nearly seventy reign of the Gulag. Given the fairly recent demise of the Soviet state, and the dawning availability of data revealing the particulars of the existence of the Soviet system of political imprisonment, forced labor camps, and summary executions, one expects this massively documented, exhaustively detailed, and memorably written work will serve as the standard in the field for decades to come. This is a terrific book, and one I can heartily recommend to any serious student of 20th century history. Enjoy! ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Comprehensive, Detailed, well Documented *by H***N on February 8, 2015* Gulag by Anne Applebaum is an essential work surveying the Soviet Gulag beginning in 1921. It is an excellent chronicle of the Gulag camps taking both a chronological survey, and a thematic perspective. The chronological chapters jumped too much in the time periods to have a sense of the author’s direction. However, Part two s very effective reflecting life in the camps from every aspect from being transported to the camps, groups of prisoners, guards, women, work, food, and simply daily living. There is liberal use of quotations that breathes life into the prison camps and the daily struggles for survival. She also goes into great detail how the camps evolved and changed over time covered. The government’s prison policies are well documented beginning with Lenin through Gorbachev. In the work Applebaum set a goal to include the prison camps and abuses under the Soviet Eastern European satellite countries. This chapter is lengthy and merely a collection of facts and figures and does not provide any of the qualitative struggles discussed in part 2. These chapters are included by the author to provide a comprehensive survey of the Soviet Gulag. With access to greater documentation Gulag is an excellent and more comprehensive work that updates Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago published in the West during the 1970s. I recommend reading A Day in the Life of Denis Ivanovich by Solzhenitsyn which gives a fictional account of one day in a prison labor camp published in the West in 1962-63. It is one book that has left a memorable impression on me. Due to the lack of information and contradictions in documents she notes the difficulties in assessing how many people entered the Gulag. In an appendix she provides a discussion of many people were impacted. Relying on other studies she that 6 t0 7 million people exiled and 28.7 forced laborers entered the Gulag. I found the introduction and epilogue mandatory reading. Kindle readers need to be aware that the book opens at chapter one and need to go back to the introduction. Her summary is outstanding and points out that the Gulag does receives very little attention in comparison to the NAZI Holocaust. In an epilogue she points out that Russia has not confronted its past atrocities, and is becoming a forgotten memory with the likelihood that history will repeat itself. ## Frequently Bought Together - Gulag: A History - Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine - Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.es/products/8166030-gulag-pulitzer-prize-winner-a-history](https://www.desertcart.es/products/8166030-gulag-pulitzer-prize-winner-a-history) --- *Product available on Desertcart Spain* *Store origin: ES* *Last updated: 2026-05-25*