RaveThe Literary ReviewAnne Applebaum has been a very distinguished student of matters Russian and East European all along. She never fell for the idiotic line peddled in Academe in the 1980s about the Soviet camps, and has now managed the very difficult feat of constructing a new version of Solzhenitsvn’s classic – one with all the fury under control. and reinforced by source-literature that Solzhenitsyn could not possibly at the time he wrote, have used. Applebaum’s book is an important complement ... The bulk of the book concerns arrest, transportation, feeding, work, clothing, survival, revolt and release. The book is well planned around these themes, and the existing literature, memoirs for the most part, has been surveyed in extraordinary width and depth. What can a reviewer say? Every page is a horror story ... Anne Applebaum has immersed herself in the whole gruesome story, and any writer can only be speechless with admiration for her fortitude and her scholarship: she is Solzhenitsyn’s amanuensis, or exegetist. It is not a book that this reviewer could ever have managed to write. but it needed to be written. and the task-could not have been done better. It deserves a prize.
