Page "Gulag" Paragraph 3

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, introduced the term to the Western world with the 1973 publication of his novel The Gulag Archipelago.

The book likened the scattered camps to " a chain of islands " and depicted the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death.

Some scholars concur with this view, whereas others argue that the Gulag was neither as large nor as deadly as it is often presented, and it did not have death camps, although during some periods of its history, mortality was high in the labor camps.