Gulag: A History

(5) "GULAG" was initially an acronym for glavnoe upravlenie lagerei, which means "Main Camp Administration." APPLEBAUM, supra note 1, at 50 (emphasis added). It referred to the department of the Soviet secret police responsible for managing the prison labor camps, id., and later to the system of Soviet concentration camps generally. Id. at xxv.

(6) Id at 8-9.

(7) Id. at 562.

(8) During the summer of 2005, Department of Defense officials sometimes referred to the GWOT as the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism. See, e.g., Tom Regan, The 'Rebranding' of the War on Terror, CHRISTIAN SET. MONITOR, July 28, 2005, http://www.csmoniotr.com/2005/0728/daily/Update. html.

(9) See Lieutenant Colonel Paul Kantwill, Foreword, ARMY LAW., July 2005, at 1 (stating that international and operational law "has become a core competency of all military attorneys").

(10) Gulag won both the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction and Britain's Duff-Cooper Prize. AnneApplebaum.com, Bio, http://www.anneapplebaum.com/bio.html (last visited Mar. 20, 2006) [hereinafter Applebaum Biol.

(11) Applebaum defines a "general reader" as a reader who lacks "any specialized knowledge of Soviet history." APPLEBAUM, supra note 1, at xxvi.

(12) Id. at xviii, xxiii.

(13) Her bibliography includes twenty-nine interviews, id. at 653-54, during which Applebanm's Russian language skills clearly paid huge dividends. As one reviewer noted, she "dearly spent hundreds of hours listening to former prisoners, former guards, and local researchers" throughout the former Soviet Union. Lawrence Uzell, Remembering the Gulag; Gulag: A History, FIRST THINGS: A MONTHLY J. ON RELIGION & PUB. LIFE (Nov. 1, 2003) (book review). The depth of these accounts gives Gulag an unforgettable personal flavor. The book also gains considerable authenticity from Applebaum's access to previously sealed archival materials concerning the Gulag. APPLEBAUM, supra note 1, at 565 ("[T]his book itself is testimony to the abundance of newly available [archival] information.").

(14) See, e.g., id. at 88-89 (quoting VARLAM SHAMALOV, KOLYMA TALES 369 (John Glad trans., Penguin Books 3d ed. 1994) (1980)) (Kalamov's description of camp life in the "Berzin era"); id. at 362-63 (quoting 2 ALEKSANDR I. SOLZHENITSYN, THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, 1918-1956: AN EXPERIMENT IN LITERARY INVESTIGATION 252-54 (Thomas P. Whitney trans., 1973)) (Solzhenitsyn's discussion of "trusties," prisoners who collaborated with camp authorities); Steven Merritt Miner, The Other Killing Machine, N.Y. TIMES, May 11, 2003, sec. 7, at 11 (book review) ("[A] great deal of what Applebaum writes about ... has been told before.").

(15) APPLEBAUM, supra note 1, at xxvi (explaining the structure of the book).

(16) Id. at 9.

(17) The Communist Party Politburo decided in 1928 that all Soviet prisoners would be sent to prison labor camps run by the secret police. Id. at 50. That year, the secret police changed the name of the department for camp management to "Main Camp Administration," or GULAG. Id.; see supra note 5 (explaining the Russian meaning of "GULAG").