Gary has lots of links about Anne Applebaum's new book about the Gulag.
"World War Two is still remembered in Britain and America as a wholly just war," Applebaum says, "the one war in which we did nothing wrong. It's very difficult for people to understand that we fought a war against one genocidal dictator with the help of another genocidal dictator, and that we liberated the camps of Nazi Germany while allowing the camps of Stalin's Soviet Union to expand.Yes.
"That's something I learned while I was writing the book. They did expand after the war: we assumed that they didn't, but they did. Soviet tyranny expanded. To this day we have trouble thinking about the Second World War as a real failure, which on those terms it was."
The Cold War, on the other hand, was "one of the great achievements of the West," she says. "The Soviet system was a criminal system, and Stalin wanted to spread it around the world." It's her hope, therefore, that the experience of those imprisoned within the Gulag "will become part of our popular memory of the 20th century".
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