Gulag: A History

Created in 1918 following the Russian Revolution, the Gulag was the vast and brutal system of Soviet concentration camps through which some 18 million prisoners passed until the camps’ ultimate collapse in the glasnost era of the mid-1980s. Long ignored by historians, it was not until Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago (1972) that Soviet labor camps first entered public consciousness. Drawing from both survivor testimonies and access to long-sealed Soviet archives, Gulag: A History is the first comprehensive scholarly examination of day-to-day life in the labor camps and the Gulag’s place in 20th century history.