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Oct. 20, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show
40:04
Timeless Wisdom - Learn History with Dennis Prager - Part 4
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Gulag: State Camp System 00:15:16
Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
Here are thousands of hours of Dennis' lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
I periodically have a history hour featuring a recently published major work on some vital issue in history, because if we understand where we came from, we will understand where we are.
And I am speaking to a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and despite that fact, I adore her.
It's somewhat like the Nobel Prize.
Sometimes it's suspect, but she deserves it.
Ann Applebaum of The Washington Post, who writes extremely important columns and extremely important books.
And this one is on a theme that touches my heart, my conscience, and my mind.
It's titled Gulag, a History.
And I had asked Ann Applebaum prior to coming on if she thought that the average person, let's not even say person, the average American, let's even say the average American who has attended college could identify Gulag.
What do you think, Anne?
I think they can probably identify the name, and they've heard the term, not least because it's now used popularly.
But I doubt very much that they have a mental image of what it was, that they can picture something or think of something or even assign it to a particular part of history.
People have heard of it, but they're not exactly sure about it.
I don't normally do this, but I'm going to ask you a question for which I only want an emotional answer.
Does that bother you?
No, it would depend what the question is.
Oh, no.
Does it bother?
Oh, I'm sorry.
Does it bother you that so many people cannot identify Gulag?
Oh, I see.
Not does it bother you that I'm asking you an emotion-based question.
It bothers me because the history of the Gulag and its role in the history of the Soviet Union is a crucial part of our history.
So it bothers me that Americans don't know this piece of their own history.
In other words, I'm not sure that most Americans, and I'm being very general because there are, of course, many, many exceptions, but I'm not sure that many Americans, I should say, really remember what the Cold War was or why we fought it.
In retrospect, it can now seem like a giant waste of money.
What was that all about?
The military-industrial complex.
We built up so many weapons and so on.
What were we fighting against?
And if you know the history of the Gulag and what happened in Soviet history, between 1918 and 1989, then you understand why.
You understand what the system was that we were fighting against, why we considered it so important, why we organized our foreign policy around it.
And if you don't remember that, then it's, I think, very hard to understand the 20th century, not only in the Soviet Union, of course, but also in the United States.
The book is Gulag, and it's probably the finest one-volume history.
And the only reason I say one-volume is because of the legendary three-volume history of Gulag, which is, I think, less readable by Alexander Selzhenitsyn, who shook the world when he published that.
So let's tell everybody exactly what it means.
Of course, it's an acronym, as it were, for the Russian word, I think it's Gasudostvani Lager, is that right?
Yes, it basically means state concentration camp system, and that's essentially state camp system.
It's an acronym that was used to describe the whole system.
The system was at its height a mass system.
In other words, it wasn't just a few prisons.
It wasn't just a few political prisons, which is what it became by the very end.
But at its height, between about 1929 and about 1953, when Stalin died, the Gulag was a mass camp system containing many hundreds of camps, each of which consisted of many more, many thousands of more little tiny camps.
It was a major part of the Soviet economy.
Some 15 to 18 million people probably went through it, certainly went through it in that period of time.
How many?
How many?
That's a hard question to answer because it depends who you're talking about and when.
But a number I'm happy with is 18 million.
Of those 18 million, how many died?
That's an even harder question to answer because of the way records were kept, because not everybody who died because of the Gulag died in the Gulag.
And so it depends how you count.
But you can, at times, the camps were very lethal.
So during the 1940s, during the war years, something up to 50% of the people who were in them died.
At other times, they functioned more like labor camps, and they were less lethal.
The baseline figure of how many actually died in the camps is about 2 million.
But when you add in people who died before they got there, people who died afterwards, people who died in other ways, once again, you begin to get numbers in the tens of millions.
Wow.
So what is your estimate?
Because I have seen estimates from as low as 15 million or even less to 40 million.
How many people do you believe Stalin is responsible for killing?
It depends how you know, I keep saying this.
It's annoying.
I know.
No, no, it's not annoying.
It depends, but it depends who you mean and how they were killed.
I mean, there were people.
That's why I said the words as a result of.
As a result of, you know, but do you include the children who were orphans because their parents were arrested and then they died in orphanages?
You know, it's very hard to.
Yeah, I wouldn't.
Yeah, that's a result of Stalin, yeah.
Yes, I think you can easily get a number, you know, you can easily get a number of 25 million.
So a lot of Soviet citizens were murdered who did not enter Gulag.
Oh, yes, many.
I mean, there were people who were murdered by mass murder in the forests during the purges in the 1930s.
There were several million people who died because of artificially organized famine, particularly the famous one that took place in Ukraine in the 1930s.
There were people who died during the Civil War, because of neglect, because of disease, because of there were many, many people who were, in effect, politically murdered outside of the Gulag as well as inside it.
Do you believe that Stalin is the one who said it's always attributed, but I've never seen confirmation.
What is it?
One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic?
I mean, I'm afraid it's one of those quotes.
I can't tell you whether he really said it or not, but it's clear that that's how he thought.
I mean, the only question, I wonder whether he thought one death was a tragedy.
I thought he came to mind when people he knew died.
So I'm not sure that.
Who started these state camps, Lenin or Stalin?
Well, Lenin began them.
Lenin and Trotsky founded the first ones.
And what distinguishes their camps was these were camps, they were not prisoner of war camps and they were not criminal camps.
These were camps for enemies of the people.
So for people who were, for whatever reason, they didn't want them to be living in the Soviet state.
They were not acceptable to society.
They were the wrong political class.
They didn't agree with the philosophy.
They were meant to be held outside of the system.
And at different times, sometimes they were meant to be reformed and then brought in, and sometimes they were meant to be eliminated, depending on the period of the different periods of history.
But they were begun absolutely in 1918 during the Civil War that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, and they lasted all the way from that time through to the end.
So even in the very end of the Soviet Union, in Gorbachev's period, there were still people in prison camps which were directly descended from the Gulag.
So they belong to the history of the whole system.
In a nutshell, since whenever anyone uses the word camp, let alone concentration camp, they think the Nazis, what's the biggest difference or differences, what are the biggest differences between the Nazi camps and the Soviet camps?
The Nazi camps existed for a much briefer period.
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Time, and they had, they were much narrower in function.
And so the kinds of camps that we think of, I mean, the Nazis actually did have labor camps in addition to death camps, which are somewhat similar to the Soviet camps.
But the Nazi camps were just, you know, were aimed at the war effort.
They were eventually aimed to destroy the Jews.
They had a narrower function.
Soviet camps, as I say, they existed from the beginning to the end, during the war, before the war, after the war.
And they ranged over, there were many different ways in which you could be in a camp.
So there were camps that were essentially collective farms.
There were camps that were in coal mines.
There were camps that were inside cities.
There was a much wider range of experience that you could have in a Soviet camp.
And they were not initially, most of the time, they were not designed to kill people.
That wasn't their purpose.
Their purpose was to supply cheap labor to the state, and as I say, to sort of eliminate the people who were a problem for the society.
I love that.
They wound up killing people through.
Yes, which we'll talk about when we return.
I'm speaking to Ann Applebaum on this hour on history.
She is the author of Gulag.
We're talking about that, and we'll return in a moment.
Dennis Prager here, and this is a history hour featuring a recent compelling work of history, Gulag, by Ann Applebaum.
She is with the Washington Post.
She has won the Pulitzer Prize.
Everything she writes, in my opinion, is important.
Her latest book, incidentally, is Iron Curtain.
And I'd like to have her on on that as well at a later point.
Gulag is about the other, if you will, it's an odd way of putting it, but the other infamous camp system, the Nazis being the most infamous, and doesn't mean the worst, but I guess they were the worst because they were death camps.
But that's what I had asked Ann Applebaum.
What is the difference?
And that is between the Nazi and the Soviet camps.
Remember, 18 million is a responsible figure for those killed in the Soviet camps.
Of course, it's over a much longer period of time.
And it, of course, raises the obvious question of were any of the Gulag camps designed, as were many Nazi camps, to kill its prisoners.
Stalin generally didn't use camps to kill people because he had a much simpler method.
He would take people to the forests and he would machine gun them.
And that's, for example, the famous Kotin massacre of Polish officers during the war and a number of famous other massacres in the 1930s.
That's how they were conducted.
The purpose of camps wasn't to kill people.
In effect, though, at some periods of time, the camps functioned as death camps because one of the ways, the way they were run was that people were meant to be laborers.
It was prison labor camps, but people were fed according to how much they worked.
And as you can quite imagine, this created a vicious cycle.
So people who were weakened or were not able to work so much were fed less and less, and the impact of that was that they starved to death.
And so food, in a way, was used as a labor.
Who devised that method?
Was it the camp commanders or was it Stalin who did so?
It was one of the camp commanders in the 1920s who first started using that method.
And it appealed to Stalin because of this sort of super rational idea.
Right, well, people who can't work for the state, we don't need them.
We don't need to spend money keeping them alive.
We will just deprive them of food.
And that was how people died.
Sadism was a fact of life in a Nazi camp.
Was it an aberration or a fact of life in Gulag?
Sadism of Neglect 00:03:42
You know, the Gulag was not run with the same kind of sort of machine-like attention to detail that the Nazi camps were.
And so some of them were very slobby and disorganized, and there were ways to get out of things, and you could trade your way up to better jobs and so on.
But sadism was certainly a part of it.
And it was very often a kind of sadism that was almost neglect.
People would not, you know, the guards would not bother to give water to a train full of prisoners on a very hot day because they couldn't be bothered, because they didn't care, because these people didn't count as human beings.
So there was a sort of there was a sadism of neglect that was very common in the camp system, in the Gulag system.
How is this for another possible difference that just occurred to me?
You knew more or less what type of person was being sent by the Nazis to a camp, a Jew, a communist.
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Homosexual, a gypsy.
But with Stalin, you didn't know who would get a knock at the door on the door at 3 a.m.
Is that right?
That's absolutely right.
It was a much wider range of people.
I mean, there were some patterns.
There were certain kinds of people who were more likely to be arrested.
But it was a much broader range of people.
And once you were inside the camp, the categories could shift.
So you might have been sent there as a political prisoner, but as I say, you might bribe the guard or you might do a deal or you might make a friend or you might sort of weasel your way through the system in a way that you couldn't in a Nazi camp because the Nazis' sort of racial categories were so much clearer.
18 Million Sentenced 00:04:33
If you were a Jew and you went into the Nazi system, you had almost no chance of surviving, whereas the Soviet system was bigger and messier and more complicated.
Well, if 18 million people died in Gulag, how many people were in Gulag?
It's got to be double that.
Well, 18 million people went through it.
And the death numbers that I'm sorry.
Okay, okay, I got you.
That's right.
25 million is about the total murdered by Stalin, but most of them were not in Gulag.
But Gulag has 18 million, of whom about what, again, were killed or died?
Between, I would say between 2 million, 4 million.
Okay, so in other words, only, I mean, I'm using this term obviously without moral reference, but at most a quarter of those who went into Gulag died, is what you're saying.
Yeah, it was a higher rate at some times, yes.
Right.
So you didn't think it was a death sentence when you were on a train to one of the camps.
No, you didn't necessarily know that, no.
And you had reason to believe it wasn't.
You had a three out of four miles.
It certainly wasn't.
Although, after some time, people began to learn that many people didn't come back and people were not expected to come back.
Once you were sent there, you would die or you would live out your life there or you would not appear.
So to be sent to the Gulag was very much like being sent out of society or sent out of the world.
And the people around you often assumed they might never see you again.
They would probably never see you again.
But was that true?
How long did the average prisoner spend in Gulag?
It was often true.
I didn't know what the average is.
Again, it was different over different times, but there were people who spent 10, 20, 30 years in the camps.
And because of the way the camps were structured, many people who were released were then released with a sort of special passport that said there were only certain places in which they could live.
In other words, they were released, but they couldn't necessarily go back to Moscow or they couldn't go back to Kiev where they'd come from.
They had to stay in the east or they had to stay in the north.
So people did disappear.
They went to the camps and they just didn't make it back for decades.
So that was a very common experience.
Were they in contact with loved ones?
Some people were through extraordinary systems of smuggling letters and so on, and some people lost all contact.
I mean, there were many divorces that took place.
If your husband was sent to the Gulag, you might want to protect yourself and your family by divorcing him because it could reflect badly on you.
People would cut themselves off, and sometimes prisoners would want their loved ones to cut themselves off because they wouldn't want them to have the stigma of having a prisoner relative or a prisoner spouse.
So yet people were often cut off.
Some people found amazing ways to stay in touch and some people cut off.
So when you have those kinds of numbers of people, you have really almost as many stories.
The social disruption is so much larger than 18 million.
The social disruption is many millions.
I mean, the echo of the Gulag.
I mean, dozens of millions.
I mean, every family member, every friend.
Absolutely.
All right, we'll be back in a moment.
This is a history hour, and the book is Gulag.
It is up at dennisprager.com.
And Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, is my guest.
18 million people.
All, and this is the amazing thing, virtually every single one, a member of the country that created the camps in which they were sent.
This was not done to foreigners.
This was done to their own people.
This is the Gulag system in the Soviet Union.
And the book is Gulag.
This is a history hour on my show.
I'm Dennis Prager.
I devote an hour periodically to some superb new work of history.
This is one of them, Gulag a History by Ann Applebaum, she of the Washington Post.
Charges and Arrests 00:03:11
And to review, you never knew who would be sent to Gulag, and you never went, at least under Stalin, you never went back home.
You might be released, but you didn't go back, as you pointed out, to Moscow or Kiev.
Is that right?
It is.
I mean, of course, after Stalin died, some of that was repeated.
Right, as I say, during Stalin, which is 1929 to 1953.
Right.
So When you were arrested, did the secret police, I guess then it was the NKVD prior to the KGB, would they say to you, so Comrade Dennis, you're arrested on charges of or not.
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With health insurance, your out-of-pocket and monthly costs are way too high.
You get surprise bills, denied claims, and poor customer service.
That's a serious burden.
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You can enroll at any time and join a proven faith-based solution that's both reliable and affordable.
CHM isn't just help.
It's financial and spiritual support when you need it most.
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And it works.
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Were any charges ever stipulated?
Well, it's interesting.
There were often charges.
You didn't necessarily know them right away because first you would be interrogated and you would not necessarily be told what it was, the crime that you were committed, because they wanted you to confess to it.
And later on you might find out what the crime was.
But actually the process of the legal process, you know, very often it was farce.
Farcical Trials 00:14:02
You know, it was you would have a trial and it would last four minutes and there would be three judges and they would do 10 trials every hour.
So they were very farcical trials.
They were quite important to the system though because they gave the guards and the people who were perpetuating the system the sense that what they were doing was legitimate.
So oh well these are criminals.
These are bad people.
We don't have to take their humanity seriously.
So it was important.
It functioned as a way of keeping the system going, this system of trials, although it was often very important.
Right, so what would a typical charge be?
Well, counter-revolution.
You know, you've been plotting against the state.
I got it.
So the prisoner's thinking, you've got to be kidding.
You've got to be kidding.
I'm lucky I could eat.
People very often thought it was a mistake.
Yeah.
Oh, right.
That's right.
And that if only you don't mean to arrest me.
And didn't some of them say a lot of time trying to profess their innocence and say that was right.
But if you had been arrested, then that you were almost always presumed to have been guilty.
They wouldn't arrest you unless they were pretty sure.
Right.
And as you point out, it's a catch-22 because if they found you not guilty, then it would put the system in a bad light.
Yes.
That they're arresting notes.
They're arresting.
They did occasionally find, as I said, it was such a big system and so complex that they did occasionally find people not guilty, and people did get rid of them.
So this is to me the 64,000 ruble question.
With all my study of Soviet history, I never quite figured out how did they choose who to arrest?
There were patterns.
I mean, they were looking for certain kinds of people.
You know, they were looking for people, for example, with foreign contacts.
So you mentioned people who were, you know, who had relatives abroad, people who might have traveled abroad, people who lived near the border territories and might have had contact.
People who, at certain times, there were particular ethnic groups that they focused on.
They focused on Poles, actually, people of Polish background in the 1930s.
Later, they focused on, during the war, they focused on Chechens.
They had particular groups and kinds of people who at different times were suspected of conspiracies.
And there was always a weird logic to it.
So there was always a kind of an explanation of a criminal case involving hundreds of people who had some connection to one another.
So there was often a pattern within a particular city.
People who knew one another might suddenly all be arrested.
But in a deeper sense, of course, it was random because people weren't guilty.
I mean, or they weren't guilty or I would call guilty a crime.
All right, we'll be back in a moment on this history hour.
Gulag is the book.
Why it's not better known and why Stalinism and communism don't have quite the horrific reputation of the Nazis.
I want to talk to her about that.
The book is up at dennisprager.com.
We return.
Welcome back or welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
It's these special hours that I devote to a great new work of history called The History Hour.
And this time, the book is Gulag.
That staggering pattern.
We used to be called the Gulag Archipelago because it was like an archipelago of these, like it's a string of islands.
This was a string of camps throughout the Soviet Union where about 18 million people were sent, and about a quarter, up to a quarter of whom were killed or died in those camps under Stalin.
And as she points out, Ann Applebaum, the writer of this, she is with the Washington Post.
And she has the virtues of being a historian and a columnist, so she knows how to write, interestingly, as well as knowing her history.
Again, the book is up at dennisprager.com and it's now out in paperback.
Gulag, her latest book is The Follow-Up, if you will, Iron Curtain, which is an extremely significant book and well worth your reading, and especially your children who may not know a thing about the Cold War.
Anyway, we're back to Gulag and the crazy, the Kafka-esque world in which a Soviet citizen lived.
I was going to say when I asked you about, did they ever get charged?
And you say, yeah, they were charged, and usually counter-revolutionary activity, which meant nothing, obviously.
It's why I laughed.
And I remember from my studies how often, especially the higher-ups during the 30s, the higher communist officials who were arrested and then killed would say, oh, if only Comrade Stalin knew what was happening, this wouldn't be happening.
Did the prisoners in Gulag think Stalin's a good guy and these crackpots are responsible for my arrest?
You know, it was such an irrational system that people sought explanations.
And so people would explain it to themselves that way.
You know, if only it can't really be this crazy, if only Stalin knew about it, he would fix it.
It must be something going wrong at a lower level.
Very often after a few years in the camps, they shed that kind of illusion.
But it was quite common among prisoners to imagine that there had been some grotesque mistake made.
And yes, they did often think like that.
Who became a guard?
Often very poor, very uneducated people, people who had very few options.
it was a job that had a certain number of perks to it although it wasn't a very attractive job if you think about being a guard in a prison camp in in in the far north it's not a it's not a um they did have to pay people well and give them vacations and so on But it was not a job that most educated people or people from cities would want to have.
Were they nearly all located in frozen areas?
No, they weren't, actually.
There were all kinds of camps, and there were some, as I said, in cities.
There was a famous series of camps, actually Solchanitsyn wrote about one of them, that were actually for scientists.
So they would arrest scientists and they would have them work in a kind of prison laboratory.
So that was a slightly more civilized kind of camps.
There were camps that were in collective farms all over the country.
I mean, there's a photo album in the Soviet archives that I once looked through, and it showed prisoners with their camels in Central Asia.
So they were really all over the country.
I mean, the worst camps and the camps that produced and that in a way stick in the memory most are the ones in the far north, the coal mining camps and so on.
Were men and women separated?
I assume they were.
Men and women were separated theoretically, but in practice, The walls between camps often broke down.
And actually, I have a whole chapter in my book about women's experience in camps, which was different from male experience, not least because of the threat of rape and also of the possibility of bribing your way or selling yourself to get better treatment and a better job and so on within the camp system by having a relationship with one of the guards.
Well, was rape common?
Very common, yes.
I mean, particularly on the transports on the way to the camp.
There was also, part of the, one of the other strange aspects of the gulag is that the camps also, at certain times in history, mixed criminal and political prisoners.
So there were, in effect, criminal gangs within the camps that would sometimes prey on the political prisoners who were of a different class and were unprepared to deal with that kind of pressure.
Were there any romances between male and female prisoners?
There were.
There were romances.
There were people who smuggled letters to one another across walls.
There were people who had relationships with each other who never saw one another, who wrote, who managed to find a way of writing back and forth.
It was almost, you have to think of the gulag, it was a kind of alternative civilization.
Everything that happened in real life happened there too, except under the shadow of this bizarre and.
Well, I'll never forget.
I was there at the height of the Cold War, and I remember one Soviet citizen saying to me, he described it as Drugoj Mir, another world.
Yes, it was.
So the Soviet Union was another world, and the Gulag system was another world in another world.
Indeed, yes.
So it was another world squared, as it were.
Yes, yes.
Now, I asked you, I mentioned before the break that I would ask this large question.
You say Nazi, Nazi has become the term for true evil, but not communist.
I have a whole bunch of theories as to why.
What's yours?
I would have a lot of reasons, actually.
I have a bunch of theories too, but I would focus on two or three of them.
One of them is because it was far away and we didn't have archives.
And only now that we have archives, we can see the real evidence, we understand what really happened.
We didn't have archives, we didn't have photographs.
Another reason was because Stalin was our ally during the war.
And it's always been very hard for us, for the United States, but also for Britain and others, to admit that we fought one criminal regime, the Nazi regime, with the help of another criminal regime.
You know, it doesn't make us look so good.
And it's always been a very difficult thing.
Very, very interesting.
We'll be back in a moment.
Final segment coming up with Ann Applebaum and her superb book, Gulag, a History, up at dennisprager.com.
Dennis Prager here on the final segment of this History Hour, where we take some recent great book of history and talk in depth with the author.
In this case, it's Gulag, a History by Ann Applebaum of the Washington Post.
And if this hasn't had you salivating to read it, I don't know what would.
And again, it is up at my website.
Well, in all that you're writing and your research, did anything truly surprise you, or did you basically learn facts that corroborated what you had already known?
Gosh, many things surprised me.
Very often, you know, the book actually contains a lot of stories.
You know, they're individual stories of people and how they coped with the camps and how they survived and how they learned to live inside the system.
And I think in some way, the humanity that people discovered in themselves surprised me, you know, that people found ways out of it, either through faith or through friendship.
They found ways to cope with it and live inside it.
You asked me a minute ago about romance.
You know, that was another way in which people tried to find positive aspects of their imprisonment and tried to survive using those.
And I kept coming across stories like that that impressed me.
Yeah, I would imagine that it would, because it could have two effects, suffering.
Embittering and you become mean-spirited to others or ennobling.
Yes, I mean, many people did become mean-spirited, and many people survived by doing horrible things.
By becoming informers or by becoming murderers, there are awful stories of survival as well as positive ones.
But When you're doing that kind of research and you're reading these stories and reading the archives, inevitably you find the positive stories.
And in a way, it's what kept me going while writing the book.
Looking for something positive to say about humanity.
Did you meet survivors?
Oh, I met many survivors.
There were several dozen people.
Were they happy to tell you their stories?
Some were and some weren't.
Some people were very eager to speak and very excited to talk to me, and some people were very wary and careful.
Some people were still frightened.
When I started doing the research, it was only a few years after the Soviet Union collapsed, and some people were still nervous about, you know, were they allowed to say this to a foreigner?
Well, you know where I hope they read your book?
In Gori, in Georgia, where they're putting his statue back up, and they have a Stalin Museum.
I hope everybody reads your book, Ann Applebaum.
It is Gulag, and thank you for your time and all you do.
Thank you.
You're very welcome.
It's an important work on an important subject.
I wish everybody knew more about it because I always feel it's a moral obligation to know what people have gone through.
Gulag, a history.
This has been a history hour.
I'm Dennis Prager.
Don't go away.
This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
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