I read Applebaum’s Gulag. A good 500+ pages as I remember. Interesting subject but it was so expansive I couldn’t read it all. I remember most Russians wanted to talk about something else rather than the author’s research. Like it’s time to move on. It was interesting that Stalin thought that prison could grow the Soviet Union even where it was geographically impossible. I sure wouldn’t mind dumping our illegal immigrant felons off in Siberia to jump start development there-slowly.
The weakness of Applebaum is that she thinks nothing has changed to this day. That colors her writing. The strength and genius of “one day in the life...” is taking the sweeping millions, and making you see it as the experience of one individual. And in truth, that’s what it was, the experience of one person with a name, one after the other, after the other.
Solzhenitsyn was one of a kind.