[[File:Olkhon Island gulag.jpg|right|250px|thumb|Remains of a Soviet gulag, Olkhon Island, Russia.]]
The '''Gulag''' is the extensive network of prison camps used in the Soviet Union and other socialist societies to imprison people who opposed [[Marxism]] or failed to live up to [[Socialist]] principles. It is an acronym is derived from Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps, spelled GuLag, ''Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-trudovykh Lagerey i kolonii'' (Russian: ''Главное управление лагерей и мест заключения'').,<ref>A ''lag'' or ''lage'' in Russian is the same word in German for "camp", as in ''konzentrationslager'' or [[concentration camp]]. The word, common to both languages, may have derived from Czarist times and the operation of punitive logging camps for criminal offenders and political dissidents. Vladimir Lenin (born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) for example, spent time in a notorious logging camp on the River Lena in Siberia, from which he adopted the name "Lenin" to identify as a proud veteran of the camps.</ref> spelled GuLag, Corrective labor is used for [[politically incorrect]] thought, word, or action. The term became well known by its use in the title of the compilation of personal historical accounts by [[Alexander Solzhenitsyn]] in ''[[The Gulag Archipelago]]''.<ref>The camps are depicted as a scattered collection of islands.</ref>
Camps were located in every part of the country—most notoriously in cold Siberia—and slave labor was used not only for mining and heavy industries but for producing every kind of consumer product such as furniture toys, and fur hats.