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:

Variety

In addition to the most common category of camps that practiced hard physical labour and prisons of various sorts, other forms also existed.

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• Sharashka (???????, the goofing-off place) were in fact secret research laboratories, where the arrested and convicted scientists, some of them prominent, were anonymously developing new technologies, and also conducting basic research.
• Psikhushka (????????, the nut house), the forced medical treatment in psychiatric imprisonment was used, in lieu of camps, to isolate and break down political prisoners. This practice became much more common after the official dismantling of the Gulag system. See Vladimir Bukovsky, Pyotr Grigorenko.
• Special camps or zones for children (Gulag jargon: "?????????", maloletki, underaged), for disabled (in Spassk), and for mothers ("?????", mamki) with babies. These categories were considered as not producing any useful outcome and often subjected to more abuse.
• Camps for "wifes of traitors of Motherland" (there was a special category of repressed: "Traitor of Motherland Family Member" (????, ???? ????? ????????? ??????)).
• Under the supervision of Lavrenty Beria who headed both NKVD and the Soviet Atom bomb program until his demise in 1953, thousands of zeks were used to mine uranium ore and prepare test facilities on Novaya Zemlya, Vaygach Island, Semipalatinsk, among other sites. Reports even state that Gulag prisoners were used in early nuclear tests (the first was conducted in Semipalatinsk in 1949) in decontaminating radioactive areas and nuclear submarines.