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Experience...
GULAG: History of a Camp
Moraine Park Technical College
Fond du Lac Campus
October 6-27, 2008.
GULAG was the acronym of the Soviet State Security board responsible for operating the penal system of forced labour camps and associated prisons. Over the years, the name has become a synonym for the camp system itself.
While these camps housed criminals of all types, the Gulag became known as a place for political prisoners and as a mechanism for repressing political opposition. Though it imprisoned millions, the name became familiar in the West only with the publication of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's 1973 The Gulag Archipelago, which likened the scattered camps to a chain of islands.
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There were more than 400 separate camp complexes, each comprising hundreds, even thousands of camps. More than 18 million people passed through the GULAG system between 1929 and 1953, with a further 6-7 million exiled to remote areas of the USSR.
