Anne Applebaum: The Gulag revealed

During its post-Russian Revolution expansion the Soviet network of concentration camps, known as the Gulag, saw more than 18 million people pass through them. An estimated 2.7 million never saw life outside the barbed wire fences again.

These startling figures are taken from Anne Applebaum's Gulag (Allen Lane, 29th May, £25, 0713993227), the first major history of the forced labour camps. The book traces the system's rise from its origins in Tzarist Russia, through to its expansion from 1929 until Stalin's death in 1953.

The American-born author is well known in UK literary and media circles, having worked for the Spectator and the Economist, and written for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, and the Evening Standard. Her book, like Antony Beevor's Stalingrad and Berlin, is certain to form part of a new historical canon for this period. "We have not been told the Russian story before," Applebaum says. "The Soviet archives are all new; it is the other half of the story of the Second World War that we never knew."

Applebaum's interest in the subject stems from her time in Eastern Europe as Warsaw correspondent for the Economist. It was there that she began to understand the psychological hold the camps had on the peoples of the former Soviet Union, and, paradoxically, how little was known about them in the West. "Most people know something terrible happened, but don't have any idea of the scale of it. Or how deeply it had penetrated the societies of Eastern Europe."

Gulag--the word is an acronym, meaning Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerie, or Main Camp Administration--is likely to generate considerable interest. Applebaum is critical of the Left for having ignored the extent of Stalin's crimes, and in this respect, the book has echoes of Martin Amis' Koba the Dread, in which the novelist attempts to deconstruct the British Left's attitude to Stalin.

Applebaum says: "The founding texts of the Soviet system are the same as the founding texts of the Western Left; it is awkward to say a Marxist society was terrible if you were a Marxist."

It is not just the Left that stands accused, but also the establishment, which nurtured a relationship with Stalin in order to repel what was seen as the greater threat posed by Hitler. "It is hard to admit that you defeated one genocidal maniac with the help of another." According to Applebaum, even now, while we revolt at the sight of Nazi paraphernalia, there are few objections to "wearing the hammer and sickle on a T-shirt or a hat".

Applebaum says that she still encounters "people who dismissed this as an uninteresting subject", and that she finds the blinkered attitude "an irritation". But she denies that the desire to reveal the truth to the naysayers was a founding reason for writing the book.

Though the Gulag was undoubtedly used by Stalin to incarcerate his political enemies, the camps' primary role was economic rather than murderous. "The Soviet camp system as a whole was not deliberately organised to mass produce corpses--even if, at times, it did."

Alongside the historical detail taken from Russian archives, Gulag includes personal accounts, gleaned from interviews with up to 30 survivors. The accounts reveal the absurdity of the system, with arrests made for marrying a foreigner or owning four cows in a village where most people owned one. This absurdity was reflected in the survivors' attitudes. "They had very different reactions to talking about it: some thought that it was hilarious and would laugh; others would cry."

Once interned, a prisoner was, according to one account, "expected not only to be a slave labourer, but to sing and smile" during work. Death, inevitably, became a shadow to everyday existence, and the struggle for survival was Darwinian.

The book took Applebaum five years to research and complete. Needless to say, despite its impressive--and often steely--objectivity, the nature of the work took its toll. "It was not an easy book to write, either technically or emotionally. I probably wasn't affected at the beginning--you become very clinical when you are doing this kind of research--but then about half-way through I went through a period where I did get quite upset, and started to have bad dreams. There was a month or two when I could not work on the book."

But there was hope, too. "I have this theory that if you survived a concentration camp, you then lived with incredible health, and a long life. The people who got through and emerged in one piece went on to lead productive lives." She cites Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose book The Gulag Archipelago is the most famous of the camp memoirs.

Further research into this area could prove difficult, with the Russian government again restricting access to its archives. "More things have begun to close now. The government is becoming more sensitive about what Westerners are doing in their country."

It was an attitude Applebaum also found among the Russian people. "In Russia there is an enormous reluctance to talk about it, it almost amounts to a denial of it. It is considered a closed chapter of history." Gulag will ensure it remains open.

Philip Jones