Gulag - Modern Usage and Other Terminology

Modern Usage and Other Terminology

Although the term Gulag originally referred to a government agency, the acronym acquired the qualities of a common noun, denoting: the Soviet system of prison-based, unfree labor — including specific labor, punishment, criminal, political, and transit camps for men, women, and children.

Even more broadly, "Gulag" has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the "meat-grinder": the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths.

Western authors use Gulag to denote all the prisons and internment camps located in the Soviet Union. The term's contemporary usage is notably unrelated to the USSR, such as in the expression “North Korea's Gulag” for camps operational still today.

During 2012 however, owing to the Pussy Riot case, and to the new political era in Russia – having started with the reelection of Putin, and hallmarked by dictatorial characteristics – it began to become evident, that the contemporary Russian penal system shows disturbing resemblances to the phenomenon and the era of the Gulag. Even at the very beginning of the Pussy Riot case, in the lyrics of their „punk prayer”, we find references to political oppression by the means of sending people to Siberia („gay pride sent to Siberia in chains”). Then later on, after the girls were given a 2 years „jail sentence” (as the BBC correspondent translated it on the air), it became clear that this actually meant 2 years in „colonial prison”, about which the more information the press gathered, the more obvious all the similarities became between the Gulag system and the contemporary penal system (see the interviews with Zara Mourtazalieva who spent 8 and a half years in a Mordovian camp, or see the news referring to „Soviet-era prison camps”). It is also important to mention prof. Judith Pallot's study „The Gulag as the Crucible of Russia’s 21st Century System of Punishment” (prepared for the conference “Gulag Unbound: Remembering Soviet Forced Labour”, University of Cambridge, 29 June 2012). This study marks a whole new era in terms of how Russian penal system is being regarded, especially now that Russia ratified Protocol 14 to the European Convention on Human Rights (January 2010).

The word Gulag was not often used in Russian — either officially or colloquially; the predominant terms were the camps (лагеря, lagerya) and the zone (зона, zona), usually singular — for the labor camp system and for the individual camps. The official term, "corrective labor camp", was suggested for official politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union use in the session of July 27, 1929.