21 Facts About Gulag

Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union.

Six years later, on 25 January 1960, The Gulag system was officially abolished when the remains of its administration were dissolved by Khrushchev.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who survived eight years of Gulag incarceration, gave the term its international repute with the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973.

About half of political prisoners in the Gulag camps were imprisoned without trial; official data suggest that there were over 2.

Gulag was sentenced to 10 years' hard labor at Solovki, which later came to be known as the "first camp of the Gulag".

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Gulag was an administration body that watched over the camps; eventually its name would be used for these camps retrospectively.

Up until World War II, the Gulag system expanded dramatically to create a Soviet "camp economy".

Gulag quickly switched to the production of arms and supplies for the army after fighting began.

In 1942 the Gulag set up the Supply Administration to find their own food and industrial goods.

Russian penal system, despite reforms and a reduction in prison population, informally or formally continues many practices endemic to the Gulag system, including forced labor, inmates policing inmates, and prisoner intimidation.

Gulag concluded that the number of terminally ill people discharged early on medical grounds from the Gulag was about 1 million.

The activity of Gulag camps spanned a wide cross-section of Soviet industry.

The majority of Gulag camps were positioned in extremely remote areas of northeastern Siberia and in the southeastern parts of the Soviet Union, mainly in the steppes of Kazakhstan .

Gulag argues that the Gulag system was not merely political repression because the system survived and grew long after Stalin had wiped out all serious political resistance.

Gulag argues that the function of the Gulag system was not truly economic.

Gulag differentiated between "authentic" forced-labor camps, concentration camps, and "annihilation camps".

The terror resulting from the operation of the Gulag system caused people outside of the camps to cut all ties with anyone who was arrested or purged and to avoid forming ties with others for fear of being associated with anyone who was targeted.

Between 1990 and 1992, the first precise statistical data on the Gulag based on the Gulag archives were published by Viktor Zemskov.

Gulag added that without distinguishing the degree of accuracy and reliability of certain figures, without making a critical analysis of sources, without comparing new data with already known information, Zemskov absolutizes the published materials by presenting them as the ultimate truth.

Gulag spanned nearly four decades of Soviet and East European history and affected millions of individuals.

Gulag has become a major influence on contemporary Russian thinking, and an important part of modern Russian folklore.