GULAG - what does it mean?
Soviet people commonly used the word лагеря (lagerya; “camps”) to refer to the penal system, as the word ‘Gulag’ in fact means the management of the labor camps. ‘GULag’ is the correct spelling of the acronym for Главное управление лагерей (Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerei; “Main Directorate of Camps”). But this abbreviation became a frequently used name for the camps themselves, most likely after Solzhenitsyn’s Archipelago Gulag was published and popularized.
The structure was formed in the 1930s as a department of the ministry called ‘The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs’, or NKVD in short, another terrifying abbreviation of the Soviet time. But the first camps appeared even before ‘Gulag’ was created.
