You can’t ask for anyone better than Anne Applebaum, author of the definitive book on gulags for the answer to this question. And, despite its problems, she definitely doesn’t think Guantanamo Bay qualifies as a gulag, unlike some at Amnesty International.
After all, during Joseph Stalin’s lifetime, still a recent memory, some 25 million people had been arrested in the Soviet Union, mostly arbitrarily, and placed in thousands of forced-labor camps and exile villages all over the country. Millions died of starvation and overwork. This prison camp system, known as the gulag, cast such a horrific shadow that people were still afraid of it, 30 years after Stalin’s death. […]
I am appalled by this administration’s detention practices and interrogation policies, by the lack of a legal mechanism to judge the guilt of alleged terrorists, and by the absence of any outside investigation into reports of prison abuse. But I loathe these things precisely because the United States is not the Soviet Union, because our detention centers are not intrinsic to our political system, and because they are therefore not "similar in character" to the gulag at all.
In her article, she also goes on to point out that Amnesty International was at the forefront of exposing gulags during the 1970s and 1980s. If anyone should know the true extent of the horrors perpetrated in the Soviet Union’s gulags, it truly should be Amnesty International. And yet, it appears they’ve either forgotten or forsaken this knowledge. Is this corporate incompetence, I wonder, or is the desperate search for the next hyperbolic headline undermining Amnesty’s ability to effectively publicise the plight of prisoners of conscience?
(Thanks to MPC at Blog de Connard for the link).
{ 1 comment }
Alexei 06.10.05 at 11:37 am
Applebaum uses “gulag” correctly, with a definite article as the word is a collective noun and refers to a system of labor camps. By virtue of that alone, a single detention camp cannot be described as “the gulag.” Anyway, Applebaum is explaining what should be obvious.
On the other hand, there is no way her book can be definitive, simply because a definitive work requires a much greater investment of time and effort, and Applebaum is only a journalist with some history education. I expect much more from Oleg Khlevniuk’s study.
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