Gulag: A History

by Anne Applebaum

For people shocked and disoriented by their rapid transition from useful citizen to despised prisoner, the experience of “seeing the light” and rejoining Soviet society may have helped them make a psychological recovery from their experiences, as well as providing them with the better conditions that saved their lives. In fact, this question—“Did they believe in what they were doing?”—is actually a small part of a much larger question, one which goes to the heart of the nature of the Soviet Union itself: Did any of its leaders ever believe in what they were were doing? The relationship between Soviet propaganda and Soviet reality was always a strange one: the factory is barely functioning, in the shops there is nothing to buy, old ladies cannot afford to heat their apartments, yet in the streets outside, banners proclaim the “triumph of socialism” and the “heroic achievements of the Soviet motherland.”