WORLD HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -The Gulag held many types of prisoners. It served as the Soviet Union’s main penal system: robbers, rapists, murderers, and thieves spent their sentences not in prisons but in the Gulag.

Detailed explanation-2: -For the Soviet political prisoners, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, all foreign civilian detainees and foreign POWs were imprisoned in the GULAG; the surviving foreign civilians and POWs considered themselves prisoners in the GULAG.

Detailed explanation-3: -In contrast, millions of political exiles and common criminals from the Russian Empire–and the Soviet Union–were sent to Siberia over the centuries. Forced migration was brutal and inhumane–millions died in the most wretched conditions, especially in Stalin’s Siberian labor camps.

Detailed explanation-4: -The prisoners’ slave labour was used in timber production and mining and on gigantic construction projects (the White Sea Canal, dams, motorways, and railways). After Stalin’s death in 1953, the number of prisoners declined considerably and the Gulag was officially done away with in 1960.