Gulag

Gulag (Russian: ????? {{Audio|ru-Gulag.ogg|listen}}) is an acronym for ??????? ?????????? ?????????????? ???????? ??????? ? ???????, "Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-trudovykh Lagerey i kolonii", "The Chief Directorate of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies". Anne Applebaum, in her book Gulag: A History, explains:

Related Topics:
Russian - Anne Applebaum

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:Literally, the word GULAG is an acronym, meaning Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration. Over time, the word "Gulag" has also come to signify not only the administration of the concentration camps but also the system of Soviet slave labor itself, in all its forms and varieties: labor camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, women's camps, children's 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 labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths.http://www.anneapplebaum.com/gulag/intro.html

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It was the branch of the Soviet internal police and security service that operated the penal system of forced labour camps and associated detention and transit camps and prisons. While these camps housed criminals of all types, the Gulag system has become primarily known as a place for political prisoners and as a mechanism for repressing political opposition to the Soviet state. Though it imprisoned millions, the name became familiar in the West only with the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1973 The Gulag Archipelago, which likened the scattered camps to a chain of islands.

Related Topics:
Soviet internal police and security service - Forced labour camps - Soviet state - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - 1973 - The Gulag Archipelago

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