Volume 50, Number 10 · June 12, 2003
Reconstructing Hell
By Orlando Figes
Gulag: A History
by Anne Applebaum
Doubleday, 677 pp., $35.00
It is almost thirty years since the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.[1] The appearance of the first volume, in Paris in December 1973, was met by a venomous campaign of vilification in the Soviet press that led to Solzhenitsyn's deportation from the Soviet Union. His exposure of the Soviet labor camps had a major impact on the dissidents and their campaign for human rights. Read in samizdat, or in copies smuggled from abroad, the book became an inspiration to the democratic movements of the next decade, when it played a major part in the challenge against Soviet authority. The policies of glasnost introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev released a flood of new material about the camps—including the first published extracts of The Gulag Archipelago in Russian in 1989 (the first complete edition in Russian was published the next year).
Review, 4201 words
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