Russia: Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum
Thoughts: I’m starting to wonder if really what I should call this section is reading around the other world, since my book for Canada was actually about la nouvelle France, my book for Zambia was actually about Rhodesia, my book for the United States was alternate history, and this book for Russia is actually about the USSR.
There is a part in the introductory chapter of this book where the author makes the same point I’ve been making since sometime in like 2001 – why is Soviet stuff kitsch but Nazi stuff verboeten? I still don’t know. My only guess is that in the west, everyone knows someone whose family was directly affected by the Holocaust (I dated someone in high school whose grandmother was a concentration camp survivor). Since so many people either died in the gulags or weren’t permitted to leave after the fact or write about it openly, there is no personal connection. I also came up with the idea that the Nazis were tangible. The parts that everyone always associates with the death camps are from ~1941 to 1945. That’s four years. Four years is manageable. The gulag was from the 1920s to the 1960s, then dropped off for a bit, then increasing again. Maybe my mind can’t imagine bad happening for forty years straight in the same way that most people can only hold seven numbers simultaneously in their short term memory.
All this means that I should care as much about people sent to slave labour camps north of the arctic circle as I care about people being lined up for gas chambers, but I don’t, even after reading this book. That’s why it only got 3.5 out of five stars. I know a lot about the gulag system now, but I still don’t have the visceral reaction to it in the same way as the Nazi concentration camp system.
Rating: 3.5/5