"This is a history of the Gulag: a history of the vast network of labour camps that were once scattered across the lenght and breadth of the Soviet Union, from the islands of the White Sea to the shores of the Black Sea, From the Artic Circle to the plains of central Asia, from Murmansk to Vorkuta to Kazakhstan, from central Moscow to the Leningrad suburbs. Literally, the worg GULAG is an acronym, meaning Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei, or Main Camp Administration. Over the time, the word ‘Gulag’ has also come to signify not only the administration of the concentration camps but also the system of Soviet slave labour itself, in all its forms and varieties: labour camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, womens’s camps, children camps, transit camps. Even more broadly, ‘Gulag’ has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the ‘meat-grinder’: the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labour, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths."

Gulag – A History, de Anne Applebaum, publicado pela Random House (2003) e pela Penguin (2004) e vencedor do prémio Pulitzer 2004 para a não-ficção