The Gulag: Stalin's Empire of Forced Labor and Terror

Between 1918 and 1956, the Soviet Union built the largest system of forced labor camps in human history. At its peak, over 1.5 million prisoners labored in more than 400 camp complexes stretching from the Arctic tundra to Central Asia, mining gold, felling timber, and building railways at the cost of their lives. This book traces the Gulag from its Leninist origins through Stalin's Great Terror of 1937-1938 — when 750,000 Soviet citizens were shot in two years — through the brutal conditions of Kolyma and the camp hierarchy that governed survival, to the deportation of entire nations and the prisoner rebellions that preceded Stalin's death. Drawing on survivor testimony from Solzhenitsyn to Shalamov, it examines the ideological machinery, the economic contradictions, and the human cost of history's most ambitious project in state terror.