"This is a history of the : a history of a vast network of labor camps that were once scattered across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union... Literally, the word GULAG is an acronym, meaning Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration. Over time, the word "Gulag" has also come to signify... the system of Soviet slave labor itself, in all forms and varieties: labor camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, women's camps, children's camps, transit camps. Even, more broadly, "Gulag" had come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the "meat-grinder": the arrests... interrogations... transport in unheated cattle cars... forced labor... destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths."