After I ripped off the wrapping paper, I gave the lazy susan a spin and started fantasizing about a winter filled with QWERTY (the typist's keyboard), ZEK (a gulag inmate) and triple-triple words stretching across eight tiles.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago (as well as other writers about Gulag) wrote that dystrophy was a typical phase in the life of a gulag inmate.

These became known in the west only as a few former gulag inmates reached the West with their stories.

The novel depicts the lives of the occupants of a sharashka (a R&D bureau made of gulag inmates) located in the Moscow suburbs.

The first section of this route, linking Belogorsk to Blagoveshchensk (124 km in length), was constructed by gulag inmates as early as 1949.

The highway, constructed in the early 1930s by gulag inmates, extends from Novosibirsk to Russia's border with Mongolia, passing through Berdsk, Novoaltaysk, Biysk, but bypassing Barnaul and Gorno-Altaysk.

Almost immediately after completion in 1975, the Khrushchev memorial became a site for pilgrims (especially for former gulag inmates whom he liberated) eager to honor Khrushchev's (mostly unsuccessful) ef forts to reform the Stalinist system.

It is estimated that of the 40,000 people collecting state pensions in the Vorkuta area 32,000 are trapped former gulag inmates, or their descendants.