Chronicles of blood

BOOKMARK

(Allen Lane, £ 25) brings the ghastly story up to the end of the Soviet era.

Drawing on recently released transcripts and records, from the sufferings and stories of survivors, she has created a richly woven narrative of historical events and individual destinies "" a masterpiece of pain, moral outrage and gallows humour.

Because of the new material now available, Applebaum's Gulag stands comparison with the very best earlier: Solzhenitysn's The Gulag Archipelago, Robert Conquest's The Great Terror, Roy Medvedev's Let History Judge, Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned and so many others that Applebaum lists out in an exhaustive bibliography.

You could well ask why anyone should revisit this chapter of human misery when it has been pretty well documented. Do we return because it is a universal human trait to rest our good conscience on our indignation over other people's wrong doing? Or because of a morbid curiosity common to us all? Or because we want to know the human cost of development?

Whatever, it is necessary to go back if only to know that though we can imagine everything, predict everything it is impossible to know how low man can sink. "If you are in a graveyard, you can't weep for everyone," Solzhenitsyn had said in his Gulag. Still, we need to know how low we can sink.

What's new here isn't the statistics. As Stalin said one death is a tragedy, a million mere statistic that nobody bothers when you have been lobotomised to such an extent. What is new is that Applebaum asks whether there is some kind of moral equivalence between Hitler's concentration camps and the Gulag, although there have been enough comparative studies on Hitler and Stalin/ Nazism and Communism by western scholars.

After all, the end results of the two penal systems were the same: Hitler with eight million Jews, Stalin with 26 million dead or missing, and still counting.

But there were differences in the origin, purpose and ways of operating. The first Soviet camp, the former Solovki monastery on the islands of the White Sea in northern Russia, was conceived as a remote place where the enemies of the nascent Soviet republic could be isolated.

Only gradually when the White Sea Canal was being constructed that its inmates were compelled to engage in productive labour, felling trees and building roads. Then, when the Soviet Union launched on a crash programme of industrialisation in the mid- 1920s, the planners decided that forced labourers could usefully be made to open up remote regions of Siberia and the Soviet far east where free workers would not settle.

In short, they became part of the foundations of a planned economy. So, coalfields were developed at Vorkuta in northern European Russia; the Dalstroi camp complex exploited the gold and platinum deposits of the Kolyma region in the far east.

Applebaum had access to the Soviet archives "" which earlier writers did not "" which clearly demonstrates that Stalin and the Politburo paid close attention to both, particularly to Dalstroi whose gold was vitally needed to finance the import of western technology during the industrialisation drive. The records show them discussing in an accountant's bland language input, output, profit without a word about human costs.

In any case, by the 1930s the human costs could be ignored because the labour camp inmates, or zeki, were branded as "enemies of the people" and therefore expendable. Mass murder was not actually an aim of the system, as it was in Nazi Germany, but the imperatives of forced industrialisation and the coming war, made it possible to impose inhuman work conditions that invariably killed many.

Applebaum describes these conditions and the appalling callousness of the camp guards who were invariably criminals, poorly educated and who readily swallowed Soviet propaganda that the zeki were not fully human and therefore could be tossed around like so much cattle.

Once you understand the dehumanisation of the camp guards it is easy to understand how the atrocities came about. All the same, the descriptions still stun the mind.