Gulag: A History

Between 1918 and 1956, the Soviet Union imprisoned approximately eighteen million people in a network of labour camps stretching from the Arctic to Central Asia. Millions died. This is their story — and the story of the system that consumed them.

Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History is the definitive account of one of the twentieth century’s defining atrocities. Drawing on Soviet archives that were only opened after 1991, and on the testimonies of hundreds of survivors, Applebaum reconstructs the full history of the Gulag — its origins under Lenin, its murderous expansion under Stalin, its bureaucratic logic, its economics, its daily life, and its final dismantlement under Khrushchev. She does so with the rigour of a historian and the narrative skill of a writer who knows that facts alone are not enough to make the incomprehensible real.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction. A book that belongs in the same category as the work of Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi — essential for anyone who wants to understand what the twentieth century actually was. Published by Penguin.