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“A truly impressive achievement. . . . We should all be grateful to [Applebaum].” —The Sunday Times (London)

“A chronicle of ghastly human suffering, a history of one of the greatest abuses of power in the story of our species, and a cautionary tale of towering moral significance. . . . A magisterial work, written in an unflinching style that moves as much as it shocks, and that glistens with the teeming life and stinking putrefaction of doomed men and rotten ideals.” —The Daily Telegraph (London)

“No Western author until Anne Applebaum attempted to produce a history of the Gulag based on the combination of eyewitness accounts and archival records. The result is an impressively thorough and detailed study; no aspect of this topic escapes her attention. Well written, accessible . . . enlightening for both the general reader and the specialist.” —The New York Sun

“For the raw human experience of the camps, read Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or Irina Ratushinskaya’s Grey is the Color of Hope. For the scope, context, and the terrible extent of the criminality, read this history.” —Chicago Tribune

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

No book is ever really the work of one person, but this book truly could not have been written without the practical, intellectual, and philosophical contribution of many people, some of whom count among my closest friends, and some of whom I never met. Although it is unusual, in acknowledgments, for authors to thank writers who are long dead, I would like to give special recognition to a small but unique group of camp survivors whose memoirs I read over and over again while writing this book. Although many survivors wrote profoundly and eloquently of their experiences, it is simply no accident that this book contains a preponderance of quotations from the works of Varlam Shalamov, Isaak Filshtinsky, Gustav Herling, Evgeniya Ginzburg, Lev Razgon, Janusz Bardach, Olga Adamova-Sliozberg, Anatoly Zhigulin, Alexander Dolgun, and, of course, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Some of these number among the most famous of Gulag survivors. Others do not—but they all have one thing in common. Out of the many hundreds of memoirs I read, theirs stood out, not only for the strength of their prose but also for their ability to probe beneath the surface of everyday horror and to discover deeper truths about the human condition.

I am also more than grateful for the help of a number of Muscovites who guided me through archives, introduced me to survivors, and provided their own interpretations of their past at the same time. First among them is the archivist and historian Alexander Kokurin—whom I hope will one day be remembered as a pioneer of the new Russian history—as well as Galya Vinogradova and Alla Boryna, both of whom dedicated themselves to this project with unusual fervor. At different times, I was aided by conversations with Anna Grishina, Boris Belikin, Nikita Petrov, Susanna Pechora, Alexander Guryanov, Arseny Roginsky, and Natasha Malykhina of Moscow Memorial; Simeon Vilensky of Vozvrashchenie; as well as Oleg Khlevnyuk, Zoya Eroshok, Professor Natalya Lebedeva, Lyuba Vinogradova, and Stanisław Gregorowicz, formerly of the Polish Embassy in Moscow. I am also extremely grateful to the many people who granted me long, formal interviews, whose names are listed separately in the Bibliography.

Outside of Moscow, I owe a great deal to many people who were willing to drop everything and suddenly devote large chunks of time to a foreigner who had arrived, sometimes out of the blue, to ask naïve questions about subjects they had been researching for years. Among them were Nikolai Morozov and Mikhail Rogachev in Syktyvkar; Zhenya Khaidarova and Lyuba Petrovna in Vorkuta; Irina Shabulina and Tatyana Fokina in Solovki; Galina Dudina in Arkhangelsk; Vasily Makurov, Anatoly Tsigankov and Yuri Dmitriev in Petrozavodsk; Viktor Shmirov in Perm; Leonid Trus in Novosibirsk; Svetlana Doinisena, director of the local history museum in Iskitim; Veniamin Ioffe and Irina Reznikova of St. Petersburg Memorial. I am particularly grateful to the librarians of the Arkhangelsk Kraevedcheskaya Biblioteka, several of whom devoted an entire day to me and my efforts to understand the history of their region, simply because they felt it was important to do so.