History: About 18 million Soviet citizens passed through their country's concentration camp system before its existence became widely known in the West with the publication of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in 1973. Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps is reviewed by Aileen Kelly
His revelations reinforced the common view of Soviet dictatorship as a monolithic machine proceeding inexorably to its chosen goals. But with the opening of police and Party archives a very different picture has emerged: irrationality, ineptitude, makeshift measures and deep confusion. As Anne Applebaum argues in the most detailed history of the camps to date, in Stalin's Utopia the difference between life inside and outside the barbed wire was not fundamental, but simply a question of degree. The contrast between the self-proclaimed infallibility and beneficence of the Soviet system and its true nature, compounded of bureaucratic stupidity, corruption, and random violence, has rarely been presented so devastatingly as in this study, which draws on an unanswerable range of sources including archives, interviews, and unpublished memoirs.
Two kinds of reasons kept Stalin's camps full - ideological and economic. The first arose from the Bolsheviks' belief in their historical mission to lead Russia to the earthly paradise of socialism. Armed with Marx's theories on class struggle as the driving force in history, they identified whole categories of people - White Army officers, priests, and bourgeois capitalists - as more dangerous to the revolutionary state than common criminals, and therefore deserving imprisonment in special camps.
The first network, set up in the remote north, could not contain the ever-expanding numbers of "enemies of the people" created by Stalin's programme of rapid industrialisation. Designed to transform the Soviet state into the Promised Land at breakneck speed, it set an endless succession of impossible targets. To explain the gap between promise and achievement, scapegoats were invented: factory wreckers, peasants who resisted being driven to starvation, and secret enemies within the Party itself. To cope with the mass arrests (about 1.5 million during the Terror), the authorities had the ingenious idea of combining ideological imperatives with economic expediency by using political prisoners as a slave labour force who could help to build communism without infecting the rest of society. Hence the creation of a vast unified system of concentration camps administered by the secret police and known by its acronym: GULAG.
According to a reliable estimate, there were 475 Soviet camp complexes, comprising thousands of individual camps ranging in size from a few hundred prisoners to many thousands. Forced labour was central to the Soviet economy, covering the entire range of industrial activities from coal and gold mining to the construction and operation of nuclear power plants and the design and manufacture of everything from toys to military aircraft.
Unlike their Nazi counterparts, these were not death camps, but their prisoners were treated merely as tools of production. Whether they lived or died depended on conditions in individual camps. The highest death rate was in the extreme north, where underfed and poorly clothed prisoners were forced to work outdoors in temperatures reaching -60 degrees.
But as Applebaum points out, conditions under Stalin were scarcely better for many outside the barbed wire. Millions perished in famines created by collectivisation, or when they were despatched to populate virgin territories without food or shelter. Of nearly 400,000 Chechens deported to Kazakhstan during the War, almost a quarter died on the transport trains alone. All Soviet citizens lived in daily fear of the knock on the door which would lead to a bullet in the head: in the eyes of their rulers they were all expendable material in the rush to Utopia.
Some of those who took part in this repression later described how they were desensitised to human suffering through constant bombardment with norms and statistics, presented as mathematical proof of the inevitability of communist progress.
The Stalinist obsession with the magic of numbers extended to the camps, which were all issued with production norms, quotas, and finely tuned calculations of the ration levels required to keep a prisoner working. All camps had to maintain files on who received what. There were quotas, too, for prisoners' deaths: camp bosses were admonished when these were too high.
As in the Soviet system as a whole, beneath this demented simulation of order, chaos reigned. Norms and goals were constantly redefined, orders countermanded, while the avalanche of minutely detailed regulations was largely ignored by camp authorities, who treated prisoners as they pleased and cooked the books when necessary.
Ultimately even the Party elite came to learn that slaves were not as productive as free workers. On Stalin's death, the secret police chief, Beria, declared his intention to liquidate the system of forced labour "on grounds of economic inefficiency". Yet while the Thaw brought about the beginning of mass releases of political prisoners, the last camps outlived the Soviet Union itself, and closed only in 1992.
In the new Russia, the Soviet system tends to be seen as a bad dream, best forgotten. In the West (where Stalin's regime, unlike the Nazi state, had faithful defenders among fellow-travelling intellectuals), memories are fading too. We hardly hear any analogies between what Stalin did to the Chechens and the killing of tens of thousands of Chechen civilians by the Russian Federation.
In the epilogue to this powerful and compelling book, Applebaum discusses the consequences of such insensitivity to the past. Totalitarian philosophies, secular or religious, which transform our fellow men into enemies and dehumanize our victims, continue to appeal profoundly to millions. We need to know why. "Each story, each memoir, each document in the history of the Gulag is a piece of the puzzle, a part of the explanation" - and a lesson.
Aileen Kelly is a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Her last book, Views from the Other Shore: Essays on Herzen, Chekhov, and Bakhtin, was published by Yale in 1999
Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps. By Anne Applebaum, Penguin/Allen Lane, 610 pp, £25