Forced labour Suffering and starvation in camps where more than a million people died

Gulag stood for “Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps” and was the Soviet government agency in charge of its forced labour camps.

Inmates included petty criminals as well as anyone deemed a political opponent of Stalin, including Trotskyists, anarchists, social democrats and “deviants” (homosexuals).

They were frequently incarcerated after being implicated in forced confessions extracted from their neighbours and colleagues.

Many inmates were starved to death after failing to meet impossible labour quotas, leading to a reduction in their rations.

Soviet files discovered after the fall of Communism revealed that at the height of the system, between 1934 and 1953, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulags.