The creation of a system of concentration and correctional labour camps began in the Soviet Union in 1919 but “blossomed” during Stalin’s reign of terror. The word Gulag is actually an acronym (used from 1930) for (Glavnoye Upravleniye LAGerey), or Main Camp Administration, which was a special division of the secret police and the Soviet Ministry of the Interior overseeing the use of the physical labour of prisoners. Alongside criminals and recidivists, the majority of Gulag prisoners were completely innocent people locked up for a broad variety of political reasons – on the basis of trumped up charges or ethnicity, or even without apparent cause. These political prisoners suffered the most because, on top of the brutal hard labour conditions and the despotism of guards, they were terrorised by criminal prisoners. Historians estimate the total number of Gulag prisoners at 20 million, of whom about 2 million did not survive their incarceration. The victims of the Soviet Gulag were not only from the nations of the USSR but were also citizens of other countries – Czechoslovaks, Poles, Hungarians, Frenchmen, Americans, and others. The vast network of camps dotted around the entire territory of the USSR consisted of almost 500 camp administrations running dozens or even hundreds of individual camps (estimates of the total number are as high as 30,000). The prisoners’ slave labour was used in timber production and mining and on gigantic construction projects (the White Sea Canal, dams, motorways, and railways). After Stalin’s death in 1953, the number of prisoners declined considerably and the Gulag was officially done away with in 1960. Nevertheless, a number of labour colonies continued to exist and were used to inter political prisoners and Soviet dissidents, though not in such atrocious conditions or numbers as under Stalin.