The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. These concentration camps held millions of political and criminal prisoners. Anne Applebaum offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag, from its origins in the Russian Revolution, through its expansion under Stalin, to its collapse in the era of glasnost. Applebaum intimately re-creates what life was like in the camps and links them to the larger history the Soviet Union.
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