Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps

Gulag: A History, also published as Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, is a non-fiction book covering the history of the Soviet Gulag system. It was written by American author Anne Applebaum and published in 2003 by Doubleday. Gulag won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the 2004 Duff Cooper Prize. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle prize and for the National Book Award.The book charts the history of the Gulag organization; from its beginnings under Vladimir Lenin and the Solovki prison camp, to the construction of the White Sea Canal, through its explosive growth in the Great Purge and the Second World War. The book tracks its diminution following the death of Joseph Stalin and its final closure in the 1980s. A large portion of the book is devoted to covering lives and deaths of camp inmates, including their arrest, interrogation, trial, transportation, the details of the rigors of their working and living conditions, the privations of starvation and disease, and the circumstances of their deaths. The book draws heavily on Soviet-era archives and on the diaries and writings of camp survivors, including the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, and Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, among many others.