* The word Gulag entered the English language as a result of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book, The Gulag Archipelago. Completed in 1968, this account of life and death in the labour camps was published abroad in 1973 and first published in Russia in 1989. Before Solzhenitsyn made it internationally recognizable, the term was already in use in the Soviet Union as an acronym of three Russian words, Glavnoe upravlenie lagerey, meaning the Main Administration of the Camps, a branch of the political police.