Michael David-Fox is professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of History, Georgetown University. He is the author of Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union; Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941; and Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918-1929. David-Fox is also coeditor of Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914-1945 and The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent archival revolution, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's famous "literary investigation" The Gulag Archipelago was the most authoritative overview of the Stalinist system of camps. This volume develops a much more thorough and nuanced understanding of the Gulag. It brings a greater awareness of the wide variety of camps, the forced labor system, and the Gulag as viewed in a global historical context, among many other topics. It also offers fascinating new interpretations of the interrelationship and importance of the Gulag to the larger Soviet political and economic system, and how they were in fact, parts of the same entity.