Origins Of The Gulag

2014-07-15 History

Author : Michael Jakobson
Release : 2014-07-15
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 38X/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Origins Of The Gulag by : Michael Jakobson

Download or read book Origins Of The Gulag written by Michael Jakobson. This book was released on 2014-07-15. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vast network of prison camps was an essential part of the Stalinist system. Conditions in the camps were brutal, life expectancy short. At their peak, they housed millions, and hardly an individual in the Soviet Union remained untouched by their tentacles. Michael Jakobson's is the first study to examine the most crucial period in the history of the camps: from the October Revolution of 1917, when the tsarist prison system was destroyed to October 1934, when all places of confinement were consolidated under one agency -- the infamous GULAG. The prison camps served the Soviet government in many ways: to isolate opponents and frighten the population into submission, to increase labor productivity through the arrest of "inefficient" workers, and to provide labor for factories, mines, lumbering, and construction projects. Jakobson focuses on the structure and interrelations of prison agencies, the Bolshevik views of crime and punishment and inmate reeducation, and prison self-sufficiency. He also describes how political conditions and competition among prison agencies contributed to an unprecedented expansion of the system. Finally, he disputes the official claim of 1931 that the system was profitable -- a claim long accepted by former inmates and Western researchers and used to explain the proliferation of the camps and their population. Did Marxism or the Bolshevik Revolution or Leninism inexorably lead to the GULAG system? Were its origins truly evil or merely banal? Jakobson's important book probes the official record to cast new light on a system that for a time supported but ultimately helped destroy the now fallen Soviet colossus.

Gulag

2007-12-18 History

Author : Anne Applebaum
Release : 2007-12-18
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 122/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Gulag by : Anne Applebaum

Download or read book Gulag written by Anne Applebaum. This book was released on 2007-12-18. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 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.

The History of the Gulag

2004-01-01 History

Author : Oleg V. Khlevniuk
Release : 2004-01-01
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 849/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The History of the Gulag by : Oleg V. Khlevniuk

Download or read book The History of the Gulag written by Oleg V. Khlevniuk. This book was released on 2004-01-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The human cost of the Gulag, the Soviet labor camp system in which millions of people were imprisoned between 1920 and 1956, was staggering. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others after him have written movingly about the Gulag, yet never has there been a thorough historical study of this unique and tragic episode in Soviet history. This groundbreaking book presents the first comprehensive, historically accurate account of the camp system. Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk has mined the contents of extensive archives, including long-suppressed state and Communist Party documents, to uncover the secrets of the Gulag and how it became a central component of Soviet ideology and social policy.

Iron Curtain

2012-10-30 History

Author : Anne Applebaum
Release : 2012-10-30
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 437/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Iron Curtain by : Anne Applebaum

Download or read book Iron Curtain written by Anne Applebaum. This book was released on 2012-10-30. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.

Women of the Gulag

2013-09-01 History

Author : Paul R. Gregory
Release : 2013-09-01
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 761/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Women of the Gulag by : Paul R. Gregory

Download or read book Women of the Gulag written by Paul R. Gregory. This book was released on 2013-09-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the course of three decades, Joseph Stalin’s Gulag, a vast network of forced labor camps and settlements, held many millions of prisoners. People in every corner of the Soviet Union lived in daily terror of imprisonment and execution. In researching the surviving threads of memoirs and oral reminiscences of five women victimized by the Gulag, author Paul R. Gregory has stitched together a collection of stories from the female perspective, a view in short supply. Capturing the fear, paranoia, and unbearable hardship that were hallmarks of Stalin’s Great Terror, Gregory relates the stories of five women from different social strata and regions in vivid prose, from their pre-Gulag lives, through their struggles to survive in the repressive atmosphere of the late 1930s and early 1940s, to the difficulties facing the four who survived as they adjusted to life after the Gulag. These firsthand accounts illustrate how even the wrong word could become a crime against the state. The book begins with a synopsis of Stalin’s rise to power, the roots of the Gulag, and the scheming and plotting that led to and persisted in one of the bloodiest, most egregious dictatorships of the 20th century.

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