Gulag by Anne Applebaum
7 out of 10Not much has been written about Soviet gulags (Glavnoe Upravlenie ispravitel'no-trudovykh LAGerei) for the primary reason that prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, not much was known about the suppression of political opponents into forced labor camps. At present, it is somewhat disfavored in media to condemn Soviet totalitarianism. With tens of millions of prisoners and over a million deaths, the gulags were an organized tragedy that peaked under Stalin, but existed before and after his reign. The author purposely does not spend too much time making comparisons to Nazi concentration camps, but adeptly covers the big political strategies and the intimate nature of the torturous life in captivity.