Gulag

Gulag, from 1918 - January 25, 1960, (pronunciation), Russian: ГУЛАГ) is an acronym for Главное Управление Исправительно—Трудовых Лагерей и колоний, "Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-trudovykh Lagerey i kolonii", "The Chief Directorate [or Administration] of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies" of the NKVD. Anne Applebaum, in her book Gulag: A History, explains:

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.

It was the branch of the State Security 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.

The total documentable deaths in the system of corrective-labor camps and colonies from 1930 to 1956 amount to 1,606,748, including political and common prisoners; note that this number does not include more than 800,000 executions of "counterrevolutionaries" during the period of the "Great Terror", since they were mostly conducted outside the camp system and were accounted for separately.

History had been so dark.