Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: #1 Text for Gulag History

This book is essential reading for anyone who is interested in Russia's violent history starting in 1918 when the first "camps" were erected and through the Stalinist purges until their dismemberment in the 1950s. The author goes into great detail what it was like to live under Stalin's paranoid regime and the fact that no one was immune from the deadly knock on the door in the middle of night. It portrays what life was like in the Gulags and that practically every family in the Soviet Union was affected by this tragic period in Russian history. The magnitude and the methods of these terrible purges almost makes the Holocaust pale in comparison. This work will be used in the years ahead as a vital reference to historians.