Podcast Summary

Podcast: LSE: Public lectures and events
Episode: The Gulag: What We Know Now and Why It Matters
Date: November 20, 2012
Guest Speaker: Anne Applebaum, Philippe Roman Professor of History and International Affairs, LSE
Host/Chair: Arne Westad, LSE Ideas

Overview

This episode features acclaimed historian Anne Applebaum discussing the Soviet Gulag system. Drawing from her Pulitzer Prize-winning research and recent archival discoveries, Applebaum breaks down what historians and the public now know about the Gulag, its enduring legacy, and why it remains relevant both to Russian society and global historical understanding. The lecture probes the economic, political, and moral consequences of the Gulag, the challenges of memorialization, and the failure—both in Russia and the West—to sufficiently reckon with its history.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Context and Historical Turning Points

• Commemoration

  • 50th anniversary of Solzhenitsyn’s "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" (published 1962), pivotal to Russian reckoning with the Gulag.
  • 60th anniversary of Stalin’s death (1953).

• Legacy of Stalin’s Death

  • Stalin’s death brought an end to his signature achievement: the concentration camps, which were dismantled due to economic disaster, fear of political retribution, and personal connections of those in power.
  • Successors were unable or unwilling to genuinely dismantle the system or its legacy, and thus “Stalin is dead, but his last terrible gaze still casts its shadow.” (Applebaum, 06:00)

2. What We Know Now About the Gulag (from Archival Research)

• Scope and Scale

  • At least 476 different camp systems, each with hundreds or thousands of camps.
  • 18 million passed through the Gulag between 1929 and 1953; 6–7 million more exiled.
  • Nearly 25 million people—about 15% of the population—experienced the penal system.
  • Camps existed everywhere, including urban centers like Moscow, serving countless industries.

• Demographics and Purpose

  • Majority of prisoners: peasants and workers, not just intellectuals or political enemies.
  • Not death camps by design, but often lethal, especially during WWII (up to 25% mortality in war years).
  • Used as instruments of forced labor and state terror.

• Economic Impact

  • Gulag labor, seen as expendable (“contingents”), was used to develop inhospitable areas (e.g., Vorkuta).
  • Led to "misdevelopment" – inefficient, costly projects, misplaced industries, nonviable cities across the far north.

“If we had sent civilians, we would first have had to build houses... With prisoners, it’s easy. All you need is a barrack, a stove with a chimney, and they survive.”
— Alexei Loginov (Former Deputy Commander, Norilsk Camps) [22:29]

• Centralized Control and Dehumanization
  • Moscow tightly controlled camp conditions, emphasizing productivity over human wellbeing.
  • Prisoners referred to as economic units; conditions designed to humiliate and dehumanize.

3. Why the Gulag Still Matters: Memory and Memorialization

• Absence in Russian Public Memory

  • Striking lack of national monuments or memorials compared to Germany or other countries.
  • Brief window of reckoning during Gorbachev’s glasnost, but no truth commissions, trials, or serious institutional reckoning.
  • Debate ended with no lasting effect on Russian politics or civic culture.

• Reasons for the Forgetting

  • Distance in time; Soviet/post-Communist history filled with multiple traumas.
  • The linking of historical debate with 1990s hardship leads to public apathy: “What was the point of talking about all that? It got us nowhere.” (Applebaum, 30:40)
  • National pride: nostalgia for Soviet power outweighs desire to confront horrors.

• Role of the Ruling Elite

  • Putin’s regime has revived Soviet symbols and rewritten history for its own ideological needs.
  • “Putin is... trying to create an alternate version of post-Soviet history, one which supports his ideology... the more nostalgia for Soviet era symbols, the... more secure his KGB clique is going to be.” (Applebaum, 34:33)

• Real-World Consequences

  • Ongoing legal, political, and penal abuses in Russia.
  • Lack of celebrated dissident figures and heroic narratives for younger generations.
  • Weak civil society and an “indifference to... judicial and police reform.”

4. Reception of Soviet Atrocities in the West

• Western Amnesia and Double Standards
  • Ignorance of Soviet crimes due to alliance during WWII, Cold War politics, lack of visual documentation, and complicated left-right narratives.
  • Early Western reporting often sympathetic or complicit (e.g., Pulitzer-winning journalist Walter Duranty).

“No television cameras ever filmed the Soviet camps or their victims... No images, in turn, meant that the subject in our image-driven culture didn’t really exist either.”
— Anne Applebaum [36:30]

• Academia and Public Debate

  • Debate over the Gulag still colored by Western ideological battles.
  • Availability of Soviet archives has made denial less tenable, but general public knowledge is still lacking.

• Moral Imperative and Historical Understanding

  • Each of the 20th-century’s mass tragedies is unique but shares patterns of dehumanization.
  • Studying the Gulag helps us confront the “dark side of our own human nature.”

“I wrote my book about the Gulag not so that it will never happen again... but because it will happen again. We need to know why.”
— Anne Applebaum [38:52]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the shadow of the Stalin era:

  “One might say that Stalin is dead, but his last terrible gaze still casts its shadow.”
  — Anne Applebaum [05:08]

• On the economic rationale behind the Gulag:

  “Contingenti. From the point of view of the Soviet leadership... prisoners were an ingredient in production. They were like lumps of coal or bars of steel.”
  — Anne Applebaum [18:50]

• On Russian resistance to penal reform and reckoning:

  “If the scoundrels of the old regime go unpunished, good will in no sense be seen to have triumphed over evil.”
  — Anne Applebaum [34:00]

• On Western memory and ignorance:

  “The camps of Stalin, our ally, expanded just as the camps of Hitler, our enemy, were liberated. Nobody wants to think that we defeated one mass murderer with the help of another.”
  — Anne Applebaum [36:30]

Key Audience Questions & Answers

[39:40] — Economic Consequences: Did the Gulag Hold the USSR Back?

• Applebaum: The Gulag system “misdeveloped” the region; projects were placed inefficiently; the economic rationale was flawed; its cheap labor bred waste and stunted innovation.

[44:13] — Why Was Solzhenitsyn Published but Not Grossman?

• Solzhenitsyn’s novel was used as a weapon in the Khrushchev-era internal power struggle—a tactical, not moral, choice. Grossman’s harsher critique was deemed too dangerous.

[47:08] — Why Has Stalin’s Reputation Improved in Russia?

• Shifts in public debate: deeply anti-Stalinist mood in the late 1980s gave way to apathy, nostalgia, and political manipulation of history under Putin.

[51:17] — How Can the West Remember Communist Crimes Better?

• Applebaum: Accessible archives have changed academic perspectives, but public education needs to catch up. Greater dissemination of survivor stories and historical material is needed.

[67:40] — Stalinism vs. Leninism: Was the Gulag Inevitable?

• The tools of terror, centralized police, and suppression of civil society were laid by Lenin; Stalin expanded these. The question whether Stalinism was a deviation or a continuation remains debated.

Discussion of Education and Archives ([56:03])

• Russian and Western scholars now have greater access to archives, changing the landscape for both research and teaching.
• Russian school curricula vary widely; some teachers and organizations (e.g., Memorial) pursue honest examinations, others use whitewashed textbooks.

Conclusion

Anne Applebaum’s lecture is a sobering, precise call to confront both the facts of the Gulag system’s immense reach and its ongoing impact—politically, economically, and morally. She urges both Russians and Westerners to see the consequences of willful forgetting, and the pain, distortion, and injustice that result when societies fail to come to terms with their darkest histories.