Whilst not containing much startlingly new, especially if you have read ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch’ or Eugenie Ginsburg’s prison memoirs for example, this is a book of great scholarship. Detailed use is made of the now-extensive ex-zeks memoirs, as well as documents from the camps’ archives. Anne Applebaum has put together a stunning overview of the whole system of the Russian and Soviet camp system. It is rather sobering to realise that under Stalin something like 18 million people experienced the camps, and that more were in the camps at the end of the 1940s than during the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. The whole story is here, warts and all, often told via the prisoners themselves, or by former guards and camp commanders interviewed in the 1990s. The story is brought right up to date – did you know that by 2001 over 4.5 million victims had been rehabilitated, with still half a million cases to be reviewed? It was not just Bukharin and the ‘Old Bolsheviks’ who were wrongly arrested. For anyone teaching Russian history over the last century this is a must. It is, despite the detail, eminently readable, and would easily be accessible to Sixth Formers. There are a few photographs – in grainy black and white, in keeping with the topic – but the strength of the book is the clear picture it presents of life in the camps, the economic rationale behind it – several leading geologists were rounded up just before an expedition was to go and look for oil in the north, just as one example – and the impact the camps had on both guards and prisoners. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.