Gulag gets short shrift from Putinland publishers

By Edward Lucas

Date: 29/09/05

Imagine a book, well written, accurate and moving, that gives the first really thorough account of America's slave trade, told through painstaking research in previously hidden archives.

A Pulitzer prize? Certainly. World-wide syndication? Certainly. Now imagine that despite all that, no American publisher is willing to publish it.

Inconceivable? Not if the subject is the equally shameful one of the Soviet Gulag and the publishers are not American, but Russian. My friend Anne Applebaum's accuracy, stylish prose and original research won her a Pulitzer Prize for her history of the camps. It has sold hundreds of thousands of copies in 28 editions around the world - except in Russia, where the book is taboo.

Yet there is huge interest in the former captive nations of Eastern Europe, where the book-buying public tends not to go for translations of foreign non-fiction (the elite read such books in English, the rest lack the time, money or inclination to read them at all).

The hardback Gulag alone has sold a startling 70,000 copies in Poland. Her agent, the worldly wise New York-based Georges Borchardt, says the level of interest is "really quite amazing".

Yet the country which suffered most from communism, providing countless millions of victims to the terror machine, has no local-language version of the best-available account of what really happened.

One reason for poor sales in Putinland might be fatigue. During the glasnost era (and golly, we miss those days now) memoirs, histories and other works about the crimes of Stalinism were everywhere. By the 1990s, Russians were bored by miserable accounts of their miserable history. The new fashion in books was escapist detective fiction. Fair enough: even in Germany, where VergangenheitsbewŠltigung (conquering one's past) is a matter of solemn private and public conscience, I can see people have a limited appetite for yet more books about the Nazis.

But does that explain why no Russian publisher wants to publish Gulag? As a devout believer in free markets, I concede the possibility that the book would sell so badly - worse, say, than an Icelandic cookbook - that translating and publishing it would be irrational. But I think it is more likely that the Russian publishers are practising self-censorship.

As Paul Baker and Susan Glasser point out in their excellent new book Kremlin Rising, Russian history is now a matter of high politics, where the Kremlin intervenes even against specific textbooks that they think cast the Soviet Union in an excessively (read: any) unfavourable light.

Anne is trying to raise money to have it published by a brave non-profit outfit, the Moscow School of Political Studies. But I have another suggestion. Why not try selling the all-Russian rights to a publisher in the Baltic states? At a minimum, it could sell among the new generation of modern-minded Yevrorussky (European Russians) there who find the cultural and political climate in the motherland increasingly repellent. Second, it would at least be available to readers in Russia proper (who mainly order books via the internet anyway).

The best thing would be if Kremlin then denounced the Baltic edition as a "provocation", or tried to respond by sponsoring a sanitised account that put the Gulag "in the right perspective". There are too many lies already. But the more that official Russian history sidles away from the democratic perspective and scholarly approach of the Yeltsin years and back to the fawning, distorted junk of the past, the easier it is to see Vladimir Putin and his "useful idiot" sycophants in the West, for what they really are.

• Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist

Article reports on the difficulties of author Anne Applebaum to find a publisher in Russia for her Pulitzer prize winning book 'Gulag: A History'. This narrative account of the origins and development of the Soviet concentration camps has sold hundreds of thousands of copies in 28 editions around the world.