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Book Review of Escaping the Gulags: The History of the Most Famous Attempts to Escape the Soviet Union?s Notorious Labor Camps

Escaping the Gulags: The History of the Most Famous Attempts to Escape the Soviet Union?s Notorious Labor Camps
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The Gulags of the Soviet Union were not original to the Bolsheviks. Tsarist Russia had already created them years before. It was free slave labor and later became associated with dissidents and malcontents of the Empire. I didn't know that Josef Stalin ran the Pravda, the Russian newspaper. Earlier, he had been a prisoner in a Gulag.

This is a very readable and exciting explanation of the origins and operation of the Gulags. It outlines some of the more notorious Gulag superintendents and then moves on to some of the more interesting escapees. This book ties together all of the parts of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's fascinating life (in one place, making for a unified story).

I enjoyed this brief but fascinating story of the Gulags of Russia.