MixedWashington Post...The book’s strength lies not in any innovative, broad analysis but in its excavation of important episodes of the early years. Above all, Suny knows Georgia ... Disappointingly, the book’s final chapters reproduce a tired account of Stalin in 1917. Suny wants to judge him mainly by his willingness to recognize the genius of Lenin’s policies after his return from Switzerland in April of that year ... His hefty, demanding tome emphasizes the effects of changing circumstances that pivoted both Stalin and Russia into a vortex of revolution and civil war. Suny leaves unexplained the mystery of why Stalin, once he achieved supreme power, went on with the killing on a scale that almost defies belief.
Anne Applebaum
PositiveThe Guardian... once [Applebaum] has cleared her throat, she tells a gripping and convincing story about the Soviet camp system ... Although this book contains little which has not yet appeared in the Russian press, [Applebaum] has interviewed several survivors of the gulag and has thoroughly examined recent publications. The result is an admirable summary of the present state of our knowledge ... While Applebaum is correct in emphasising economics, she might have given more weight to politics ... A strength of the book is the author\'s insistence that conditions in the camp were meant to be severe but bearable. Only in the second world war, when malnutrition afflicted most people in the USSR, were the rations lowered below those levels ... It would be difficult to put every guilty official on trial, but Anne Applebaum is right that more could have been done and could still be done.
