Definition of "GULAG"

The millions of slave-labourers at the disposal of GULAG played an important economic role, and indeed became accepted as a normal component of the Soviet economy.

1968, Robert Conquest, “In the Labour Camps”, in The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, part II (The Yezhov Years), page 356

One important difference between the GULAG system and the Nazi concentration camps was that a person sentenced to five years of hard labor in a Soviet labor camp could expect, assuming he or she survived, to be released at the end of the sentence.

, David Hosford, Pamela Kachurin, Thomas Lamont, “Day 1 Content Essay: The Establishment and Scope of the GULAG System”, in GULAG: Soviet Prison Camps and Their Legacy […]‎, [U.S.A.]: National Park Service; Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, archived from the original on 31 October 2021, page 7, column 1