While the Holocaust still garners much attention worldwide, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum called on students not to ignore the brutality of the Soviet gulags as well.
Her book, Gulag: A History, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and was the centerpiece of Thursday evening's "reading and conversation on the Soviet gulags" at the Kelly Writers House Arts Cafe.
Applebaum was the inaugural speaker for the University's Cold War Project.
She drew on her research in Russian archive centers to describe the Soviet gulags, which consisted of 476 camp systems throughout Siberia.
These forced-labor camps, Applebaum said, first appeared in 1913 and were expanded in 1929 under former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's Five Year Plan to increase labor production. To mechanize the Soviet economy, gulags "disregarded humanity" through forced labor, while prisoners were given only bread and rancid meat. Scurvy was nearly ubiquitous.
Decrying the lack of a "central place of mourning" -- in Moscow or elsewhere -- for survivors of the gulags, Applebaum opined that the country's failure to properly recognize and repent of such horrors, combined with the economic collapse of the last decade, has resulted in the lack of relevant official discussion.
Fluent in Russian and Polish, Applebaum recalled speaking with survivors, who -- for reasons of pride and because their memories are so clouded with the atrocities of war and famine -- are reluctant to accept documented truths even decades later.
"A 60-year-old doesn't want to say it was a disaster; they want to remember something positive," Applebaum said.
During the subsequent question-and-answer period, Applebaum criticized the limited treatment of Russian gulag history compared to the great attention given to the Holocaust.
She emphasized that the lack of tangible evidence in the form of photographs, videos and personal artifacts should not preclude proper remembrance of and education regarding the Russian gulags.
Applebaum's presentation garnered approval from many attendees, including College freshman Barbara Coons, who agreed that "you would never buy Nazi memorabilia, but it's OK to buy Russian [souvenirs]."
College of General Studies student Peter Schwarz, who introduced Applebaum and co-coordinates the Cold War Project, said that Applebaum's book is "a significant contribution to reclaiming that part of history and restoring social memory" of the gulags.
Associate Director of Lubavitch House Rabbi Levi Haskelevich said, "We all know the name of Auschwitz and the people who died there, but one little museum stuffed away in Siberia" is an inadequate reminder of the severity of such a social blight.
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