GULAG

See also: gulag, gułag, gúlag, Gulag, and GUŁag

English

Etymology

Borrowed from Russian ГУЛА́Г (GULÁG), the acronym of Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й (Glávnoje upravlénije ispravítelʹno-trudovýx lageréj, “Chief Administration of Corrective-Labor Camps”): see the definition.[1]

Pronunciation

(Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈɡuːlɑɡ/, (sometimes) /-læɡ/, /ɡuːˈlɑk/
Audio (Southern England) (file)
(General American) IPA^(key): /ˈɡuˌlɑɡ/, (sometimes) /-ˌlæɡ/
Hyphenation: GU‧LAG

Proper noun

GULAG

(historical) The government agency in charge of the Soviet Union's network of forced labour camps, which was established in 1918 and formally abolished in 1960.
- 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, OCLC 405895, part II (The Yezhov Years), page 356:
  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.

Translations

government agency in charge of the Soviet Union’s network of forced labour camps

Belarusian: ГУЛА́Г m (HULÁH)
Russian: ГУЛА́Г (ru) m (GULÁG), ГУЛа́г (GULág), Гула́г (Gulág)
Ukrainian: ГУЛА́Г m (HULÁH), ГУТА́Б m (HUTÁB)

Noun

GULAG (plural GULAGs)

Alternative letter-case form of gulag
- [2006?], 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, OCLC 75965285, archived from the original on 31 October 2021, page 7, column 1:
  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.

References

“Gulag, n.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, March 2019; “Gulag, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.