Anne Applebaum on Concentration camp

“The Gulag had antecedents in Czarist Russia, in the forced-labor brigades... in Siberia from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. It... took on its modern... familiar form almost immediately after the Russian Revolution. Mass terror against real and alleged opponents was part of the Revolution from the very beginning—and by... 1918, Lenin... had already demanded that "unreliable elements" be locked up in concentration camps outside major towns. A string of aristocrats, merchants, and other people defined as potential "enemies" were duly imprisoned. By 1921, there were... eighty-four camps... mostly designed to "rehabilitate" these first enemies of the people.”

“This is a history of the Gulag: a history of a vast network of labor camps that were once scattered across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union... Literally, the word GULAG is an acronym, meaning Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration. Over time, the word "Gulag" has also come to signify... the system of Soviet slave labor itself, in all forms and varieties: labor camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, women's camps, children's camps, transit camps. Even, more broadly, "Gulag" had come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the "meat-grinder": the arrests... interrogations... transport in unheated cattle cars... forced labor... destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths.”