Gulag: a history of the Soviet camps Anne ApplebaumAllen Lane, The Penguin Press, 622pp, £25 ISBN 0713993227

It was while walking one day over the Charles Bridge in Prague, writes Anne Applebaum, that she first became aware of the west's strange indifference to the crimes of the Soviet regime. On sale among the tourist bric-a-brac were Soviet military trinkets - caps, badges, belts and so forth. None of the American or west-European tourists strolling along the bridge would have dreamed of buying Nazi memorabilia. Why the discrepancy? Or why, asks Applebaum, moving from the popular to the highbrow, has Martin Heidegger's brief infatuation with Nazism done such damage to his reputation, while Jean-Paul Sartre's far longer and less excusable support for Stalinism is largely ignored? These and other, similar observations encouraged Applebaum to tackle the history of the Soviet concentration camps. Her intention is to bring the Gulag out of the shadows, to restore it to its proper place in the public consciousness. It is an admirable aim, but I doubt it can succeed.

Mention of the Gulag always leads to comparison with the Nazi holocaust. The two crimes have become ammunition in the struggle between left and right over the interpretation of 20th-century history. To Applebaum's credit, she avoids the silly and distasteful rivalry that this debate often generates. There is something indecent about attempts to quantify evil, particularly on this scale. Applebaum's purpose is commemorative, not political. "The emotions and the politics which have long surrounded the historiography of the Soviet concentration camps do not lie at the heart of this book," she writes. "That space is reserved, instead, for the experience of the victims."

The main part of Gulag is accordingly devoted to the daily life of the camps. There are chapters here on the experience of women and children, on the various strategies for survival, on rebellion and escape, on sickness and on death. What emerges from this accumulation of facts is the difficulty, indeed impossibility, of maintaining a system of total subjugation in the modern world. Even in conditions of desperate scarcity, the social instinct seems to have been irrepressible. Far from degenerating into a rabble, prisoners organised themselves into groups, usually ethnic, governed by strict codes of honour. Informers, or "bitches", were punished ruthlessly. Some prisoners developed sophisticated techniques for evading work and corrupting the guards, undermining the Gulag's already dubious economic rationale. Others fomented strikes and rebellions. Even before the death of Stalin in 1953, the camp system was in disarray. After his death it quickly became unmanageable. A chain of revolts in 1953 and 1954 helped convince Nikita Khrushchev to grant a general amnesty. The leadership had in any case lost its stomach for Stalinist methods. George Orwell famously envisaged totalitarian society as a boot stamping on a face for ever, but the last three decades of the Soviet Union failed to bear him out. The post-Stalinist regime was characterised, if not exactly by liberalisation, then at least by a slackening of repression. The number of political prisoners dropped to a few thousand. The last were released in 1992, a year after the disappearance of the state that incarcerated them.

If Gulag is strong on detail, it is weak on analysis. The political background is somewhat sketchy and in places inaccurate. It is not true, for example, that Stalin's collectivisation drive of 1929 was a response to "greater impoverishment" and "growing popular discontent with the revolution". On the contrary, conditions had improved steadily over the 1920s, due mainly to Lenin's "New Economic Policy" of limited free enterprise. I would have been interested to know more about the role of the Gulag in Soviet politics and society. The daily routine of a labour camp is, after all, similar across the globe, and doesn't reveal much about what was peculiar to the USSR. More might have been said on the issue of the camps' profitability. Applebaum assumes, on the basis of not very much evidence, that they made a loss throughout. Given the fierce debate over the economics of slave labour in America, the question deserves more scrutiny. Finally, more might have been said about the impact of camp returnees on Soviet society. It is often claimed that the present-day Russian mafia has its roots in the camps, prisons and children's homes of the Soviet Union. There is a fascinating story to be told here, and it awaits another book.

But Applebaum's final verdict on the legacy of the camps is trenchant. Modern Russia has done its best to forget the Soviet past. There are few state memorials, and little attempt has been made to deliver justice to the perpetrators or compensation to the victims. "Why bother now?" is the common response to such demands. Russia has new problems; let bygones be bygones. But Russia's new problems are not entirely unconnected to its old problems. The failure to deal justly with the past encourages cynicism and opportunism in the present. "Nothing encourages lawlessness more than the sight of villains getting away with it, living off their spoils and laughing in the public face." Applebaum is pessimistic about the possibility of immediate change. "Society is indifferent to the crimes of the past," she quotes the chairman of the Russian rehabilitation commission, Aleksandr Yakovlev, as saying, "because so many people participated in them." Many members of the old guard, not least Vladimir Putin, are still in positions of power. Russia's reckoning with its past will have to wait until they are dead.

We in the west have our own reasons for indifference. After reading this book, I remain doubtful that the Soviet genocide will ever - for reasons that are as much aesthetic as anything - achieve the same fame as the Holocaust. The latter has a drama-tic, exemplary clarity to it - its aim was straightforward, both perpetrators and victims were clearly defined, and it was executed with bureaucratic efficiency. Such a blatant display of evil has a clear aesthetic - indeed pornographic - appeal, as is evinced by the endless stream of books, films and television programmes that continue to appear on the subject. The Soviet Gulag is an altogether murkier terrain. It is still not clear why Stalin embarked on the purges, to what extent he remained in control of them, and what - if any - were his principles of selection. Nor are victims and perpetrators so clearly distinguished; almost everyone in Stalin's Russia was in some sense a victim, and many, perhaps even a majority, bore some small share of the guilt. The camps seem to disappear into the wider history of war, famine and forced industrialisation, so that the entire episode can come to look more like a natural catastrophe than a human crime. And this is very convenient for those on the left who retain a sneaking admiration for the ideals of communism. But evil need not be blatant; it can be - indeed, usually is - involved, murky, intractable. Cruelty is usually the "unthinking, stupid, lazy cruelty" that Applebaum attributes to the Soviet camp guards. The Soviet experience may, for these very reasons, contain more lessons for us than the Nazi one.

Edward Skidelsky is an NS lead reviewer

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