gulag

Etymology

at Intalag, a forced labour camp of the gulag (sense 1) near Inta in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, mainly involved in coal-mining.]] Borrowed from Russian ГУЛА́Г (GULÁG), the acronym of Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й (Glávnoje upravlénije ispravítelʹno-trudovýx lageréj, “Chief Administration of Corrective-Labor Camps”), 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: see GULAG.

noun

1. (historical) Also GULAG: the system of all Soviet labour camps and prisons in use, especially during the Stalinist period (1930s–1950s).
   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. [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, archived from the original on 2021-10-31, page 7, column 1
2. (by extension)
   1. A prison camp, especially one used to hold political prisoners.
   2. (also figurative) A place where, or political system in which, people with dissident views are routinely oppressed.

verb

1. (transitive, informal, also figurative) To compel (someone) into a forced labour camp or a similar place of confinement or exile.
   Regulative censorships can be amended or revolutionized in ways that raise or lower bodycounts, numbers of books banned or citizens ghettoed or gulaged. 1988, Sue Curry Jansen, Censorship: The Knot that Binds Power and Knowledge (Communication and Society), New York, N.Y., Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, page 8
   The marriage would be the last good thing in [Spencer] Haywood's life for a long time. He was gulaged to basketball Siberia—the now-defunct New Orleans franchise—for his failure to resurrect the Knicks, but at [Kareem Abdul-]Jabbar's urging the Lakers acquired him in 1980. 1993 September, Nelson George, “Haywired”, in Jonathan Van Meter, editor, Vibe, New York, N.Y.: Time Inc. Ventures, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 116, column 3
   Such a situation touches off in the reader a powerful sense of historical déjà vu: witch hunts, Gestapo roundups, the McCarthy era, Argentinian death squads, [Francisco] Franco and the murder of [Federico] Garcia Lorca, the KGB and the disappearance of Isaac Babel, the gulagging of Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, to name just a few. 1998, Peter Makuck, “Dangerous Difference: W[illiam] D[e Witt] Snodgrass’s The Death of Cock Robin”, in Philip Raisor, editor, Tuned and Under Tension: The Recent Poetry of W. D. Snodgrass, Newark, N.J.: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, page 31
   [Abraham Michael] Rosenthal's reign was described by many as a period of paranoia and terror at the [New York] Times—one reporter said, "He was like the Czar; people would get gulaged at the drop of a hat." 2001, Larry Gross, “Journalism’s Closet Opens”, in Up from Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media in America (Between Men—Between Women), New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, page 118
   He wanted American Christians to pay reverence to the greater glory of the USSR, which, in his mind, was not a nation blowing up churches, gulaging the religious, shooting priests, locking up nuns with prostitutes—declaring nus "whores to Christ"—and pursuing what Mikhail Gorbachev later correctly described as a "war on religion." 2012 October, Paul Kengor, “Frank’s Writings in the Chicago Star (1946–48)”, in The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor, New York, N.Y.: Threshold Editions/Mercury Ink, page 138
   Knowledge that does not serve the state ideological apparatus or the dominant ruling, economic, intellectual or political force is knowledge or ideas that are consciously suppressed and "gulaged". 2017, Susan S. M. Edwards, “Cyber-grooming Young Women for Terrorist Activity: Dominant and Subjugated Explanatory Narratives”, in Emilio C. Viano, editor, Cybercrime, Organized Crime, and Societal Responses: International Approaches, Cham, Switzerland=: Springer Nature, →DOI, page 30
   The kids of high socioeconomic status were on the fifth floor, the lowest on the ground floor. The Technical Arts building had the Cape Verdeans and the Haitians … all of whom were Gulagged there in a building which they not-so-ironically called "the island." 2019, Jal Mehta, Sarah Fine, “The Progressive Frontier: Project-based Learning”, in In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School, Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, page 52
   For Dad, home had been pulverized, reduced repeatedly to its nuclear constituents. As if he'd been gulagged to the Big Bang of belonging. An imaginary time, without boundary, without beginning or end. 2020, Fady Joudah, “Your Name is on the List and Other Vignettes”, in Pauline Kaldas, Khaled Mattawa, editors, Beyond Memory: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Creative Nonfiction, Fayetteville, Ark.: University of Arkansas Press, page 116