Forced labor in the Soviet Union

Letter of GULAG prisoners (Tagil Camp) which was found in a wall of the Nizhniy Tagil Theater in 2005: "This note was placed into the wall on 15 March 1954 without the sounds of orchestra and chatter of audience. But it will tell the ancestors that this theatre was built not by Komsomol volunteer brigades, how they will later write in newspapers, but it was built on blood and bones of prisoners - the slaves of 20th century."

The following closely related categories of forced labor in the Soviet Union may be distinguished.

• Pre-Gulag forced labor of the early Soviet Russia and Soviet Union
• The Gulag system,
• The kolkhoz system
• The Stroybat (construction battalions) system,
• Foreign forced labor in the Soviet Union of 1939-1954 which included forced labor of the World War II prisoners of war and internees.
• Post-Joseph Stalin penal labor in the Soviet Union: Corrective labor colony (Исправительно-трудовая колония, ИТК), Colony-settlement (Колония-поселение), corrective labor without incarceration (Исправительные работы без лишения свободы).

See also

• Katorga, penal labor in the Russian Empire