whats the meaning of the word "gulag'?

Answer 1

A labor camp. For more details, follow the link.

What the ****? There was nothing wrong with my answer, but it got a thumbs down - who did that?

Answer 2

Whats A Gulag

Answer 3

When we heard the word "gulag",the first thing that comes into our mind that it was a Russian labor camps or a concentration camps,Since the beginning of the Soviet Communist era.Like in Auschwitz,Poland during WWII.To find out more about it,check the word on a Wikipedia.It's one click away right?

Answer 4

Chief gives the literal origin. But it doesn't really tell you what the Gulag was all about, until you understand what "corrective labour" meant in Russia during much of the 20th century.. For that, follow Humbug's excellent link (for which I awarded him a thumbs up)-- to the introduction to Anne Applebaum's Pulitzer Prize-winning *Gulag: A History* [2003]).

If you want any real understanding of the matter, read at least that part of the book -- and check the whole thing out if you get a chance (I recently checked it out from the library... very good.)

If at some point you want a lot more stories of the Gulag, THE work to consult is *The Gulag Archipelago*, the multi-volume work by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, himself one of the millions who spent years interred in the gulag camps. (It came out in English in the 1970s.. the first exposure many of us got to this horror). He also captured a nice snapshot of life in such a place in his shorter work *A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich* (the only work of his that he managed to get published in the Soviet Union, during a brief "thaw" in the early 60s)
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For a real quick :"feel" -here's how the front book flap of Applebaum's work begins:

"The Gulag--the vast array of Soviet concentration camps--was a system of repression and punishment whose rationalized evil and institutionalized inhumanity were rivaled only by the Holocaust."

Answer 5

The word is an acronym for:
Главное Управление Исправительно—Трудовых Лагерей и колоний, or,
"Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-trudovykh Lagerey i kolonii", or,
"The Chief Directorate [or Administration] of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies"