Anne 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.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the gradual opening of KGB archives, the full horror of the Gulag is gradually emerging, and Applebaum has done a masterful job of chronicling the origin, growth, and eventual end of this monstrous system ... Now, we are left with the evidence, the memory of survivors, and the moral obligation to uncover the full story. This brilliant and often heartbreaking work is a giant step in the fulfillment of that obligation.

... a great deal of what Applebaum writes about in 'Gulag: A History has been told before...But that does not lessen her achievement ... Applebaum's book weighs in heavily in support of Solzhenitsyn on almost every point, and her account is backed not only by a careful use of the vast memoir literature but also by a thorough mining of the long-closed Soviet archives. Most important, she supports Solzhenitsyn's central argument: that the gulag was not some incidental Stalinist accretion to Lenin's visionary concept of Socialism ... Particularly useful is Applebaum's account of the camps during World War II ... It is fervently to be hoped that people will read Anne Applebaum's excellent, tautly written and very damning history. Even more fervently, one hopes that it will soon be translated into Russian.

... 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.

... grim and unrelenting, an enlightening but difficult read. If the contemplation of evil, on its own, could make us better human beings, this book would be an excellent investment ... one of the most vivid histories we have of a system – 'the meat grinder', Russians called it – that marked or destroyed the lives of millions ... readers in Britain and America should beware. Neither they, nor I, nor Applebaum, are victims or survivors in this tale. Our place is not among the righteous, complacent as the winners of Cold War, and nor is it to be found in a clean, bright space where ideology is dead. The debates about freedom, justice and inequality rage on. The Gulag has gone, but individual responsibility for collective and ideologically driven excess, whether it be racist slaughter, imprisonment without trial, or abominations like Death Row, begins at home.

Applebaum details camp life, including strategies for survival; the experiences of women and children in the camps; sexual relationships and marriages between prisoners; and rebellions, strikes and escapes. There is almost too much dark irony to bear in this tragic, gripping account. Applebaum's lucid prose and painstaking consideration of the competing theories about aspects of camp life and policy are always compelling. She includes an appendix in which she discusses the various ways of calculating how many died in the camps, and throughout the book she thoughtfully reflects on why the gulag does not loom as large in the Western imagination as, for instance, the Holocaust.

A searing, engrossing history ... Extraordinary in its range and lucidity: a most welcome companion to Bernard-Henri Levi’s Barbarism With a Human Face, Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, and, of course, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.