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Gulag: A History
Army Lawyer, April, 2006 by William J. Dobosh, Jr.
The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law. (3)
In June 2005, Amnesty International's scathing comparison of a U.S. military detention center to the Gulag drew the ire of several political commentators (4) and revived an ominous word from the lexicon of the Soviet Union. "Gulag" (5) refers to the vast network of Soviet prison labor camps that began under Vladimir Lenin (6) and continued until the Soviet Union dissolved in the 1990s. (7) In light of the ongoing Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), (8) U.S. military detention centers for enemy combatants could expand. Because increasing numbers of commanders may seek advice on detention operations, judge advocates should study detention center issues and develop the ability to contend with any associated international criticism. (9)
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Contending with Amnesty International's criticism must begin with an account of the Gulag, such as Anne Applebaum's award-winning (10) Gulag: A History. In Gulag, Applebaum provides general readers (11) a survey of the "social, cultural, and political framework" of the Gulag camps (12) and illuminates the Gulag's memorable human drama. Applebaum extensively researched her account, (13) and her impressive array of sources includes government archives, interviews, personal memoirs and earlier, more definitive works on the Gulag. (14) In key sections of the work, however, Applebaum avoids using the Gulag's history to critically analyze American detention policies in the GWOT. While Applebaum's rich historical narrative makes Gulag interesting reading, her failure to explore a broader range of contemporary lessons, such as the U.S. government's detainee policies in the GWOT, prevents it from being indispensable.
Gulag contains three substantive sections: two sections explain the history of the camps, and one section describes daily life in the camps. (15) Applebaum conveys a wealth of information in her two historical sections. She painstakingly describes the origins of Soviet concentration camps during Lenin's "Red Terror" in 1918, (16) their re-designation as the Gulag after 1928, (17) and their expansion from the Solovetsky Archipelago across the entire landscape of the Soviet Union. (18) She recounts the Gulag's growth under Stalin, who envisioned the camps as a source of cheap labor for Soviet economic development, (19) including massive public works projects. (20) Finally, Applebaum explains the Gulag's steady decline under Stalin's successors. (21)
Because Applebaum does not presume that her readers have any specialized knowledge of Soviet history, she methodically develops the Gulag narrative. The copious detail in the historical sections might be overwhelming. For more patient readers, however, these sections will situate the rise and fall of the Gulag labor camps within the larger context of Soviet history and show that the Gulag was an inescapable reality of Soviet life. (22) The most memorable part of Gulag for general readers may be its middle section that describes the daily lives of camp prisoners, guards, and administrators. This collection of anecdotes is probably Applebaum's greatest contribution to Gulag literature. (23) Each personal story provides a compelling glimpse into the prisoners' suffering, from arrest to transport to confinement in the dreadful camps.
These vignettes also expose the inept management that consistently undermined the Gulag's productivity and exacerbated the misery of the zeks (Gulag prisoners). Applebaum explains that "in principle," the camps' operational guidelines should have maximized worker productivity. (24) In practice, these guidelines were rarely applied due to the administrator's frequent incompetence and occasional cruelty. (25) Although Stalin apparently tied so much of his nation's economic fortunes to the Gulag, the actual conditions in the camps likely hampered camp productivity and Soviet economic growth. He apparently never understood--possibly due to either misinformation from subordinates or his own willful ignorance and denial--that the capacity to work tends to decline when people are cold, starving, poorly housed, and neglected. The stories that Applebaum has compiled illustrate the folly of Stalin's vision and the dreariness of Gulag life better than any matter-of-fact account ever could.
Unfortunately, Applebaum's historical account is more elaborate documentation than thoughtful analysis of the Gulag system. Applebaum's organization of Gulag compounds this deficiency. Applebaum devotes Part Two of Gulag to personal vignettes about camp life, but details of camp life also seep into the book's ostensibly historical sections, Parts One and Three. The result is a narrative that sometimes feels repetitive. Details of horrible working conditions and meager food portions are shocking initially, but they grow increasingly less poignant with each subsequent rehashing.
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