What are Soviet Gulags? What happened in Gulags? And what did they accomplish? The word "Gulag" is actually an acronym of its official bureaucratic name, Glavnoe Upravlenie Ispravitel'no-trudovykh LAGerei. When translated from Russian, it roughly means "the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps." The gut-wrenching system of forced labor camps was first established following the Russian Civil War. By the 1950s, the Gulags would stretch across the entirety of the Soviet Union's territory. It was arguably one of the darkest periods of 20th-century history.