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.”

2. (broadly)A prison camp, especially one used to hold political prisoners.

   “Nevertheless, the Trump administration has continued to insist that Abrego Garcia is a dangerous gang member in order to justify sending him to an overseas Gulag that has been accused of torturing inmates.”

   “The subtext of Knowles’s tweet was also clear: [Nayib] Bukele has partnered with the Trump administration to hold immigrants deported from America, with no due process, in El Salvador’s most notorious gulag.”

3. (also, broadly, figuratively)A place where, or political system in which, people with dissident views are routinely oppressed.
4. (alt-of)Alternative letter-case form of gulag.
5. (alt-of)Alternative letter-case form of gulag.

   “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.”

verb

1. (also, figuratively, informal, transitive)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.”

   “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.”

   “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.”

   “[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."”

   “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."”

name

1. (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.

   “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.”