I’ve been working my way through a really good book over the Christmas/ New Year break, Gulag – A History by Anne Applebaum. It’s not a new book, but one that I have had on the shelf for some time.
A fascinating read and full of amazing facts. Whilst the Holocaust remains rightly in our minds for the atrocity that it was; the numbers of people from many ethnic backgrounds that Joseph Stalin had sent through the Gulag system is staggering!
While many were not directly murdered upon their arrival at the camps unlike the Jews; many simply died of cold, starvation, overwork and abuse in a regime that few managed to escape from.
I seems that final figure of those who died will always be hard to determine, estimates run from from 2 million to 3 million. But surely as many ethnic (from Jew’s to Tartars) groups faced mass incarceration and probable death, it’s another aspect of the 20th Century that should not be forgotten.
As with many books I read these days, I can’t stop going to the Internet to check or look for extra facts, here’s some that I found about this terrible story.
Beasley's Place 