Image credit: Golfo Alexopoulos

In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn called Stalin’s gulag a system of “destructive-labor camps.” The writer who brought the gulag to light insisted that “the camps were destructive and this must not be forgotten.” Why then, following the declassification of the gulag archives, did the official mortality rates appear so low? Two scholars offered the same explanation.

Anne Applebaum's latest book, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956, was published by Doubleday on October 30, 2012. In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize–winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and frighteningly changed the lives of those who came under its sway.

The Hoover Summer Workshop on China and Russia hosted a talk and discussion on the Chinese Gulag under Mao by Klaus Mühlhahn

Mühlhahn is a professor of Chinese history and culture at the Free University of Berlin who specializes in modern Chinese legal history. His Criminal Justice in China (Harvard) won the American Historical Association’s Fairbank Prize and his PhD students are regular visitors to the Hoover Archive’s China collections.

Sarah Paine is a professor of strategy and policy, US Naval War College. According to Paine, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, not primarily to break the US oil embargo but as a peripheral military strategy to win its long war in China. That same day (December 7, 1941), Japan also attacked Malaya, Hong Kong, Guam, the Philippines, Wake Island, Midway, Thailand, and Singapore in efforts to cut Western aid to the Chinese Nationalists and to force the Netherlands to supply it with the Dutch East Indies oil essential its waging war in China.