How to Use gulag in a Sentence

gulag

noun
  • Mistakes like this promise a one-way ticket to the gulag or worse.
    — Peter Rainer, The Christian Science Monitor, 16 Mar. 2018
  • Nadym, a former gulag camp, is now a booming town of gas workers.
    — Anatoly Kurmanaev, WSJ, 29 Nov. 2018
  • The Uyghurs in the gulag, among others, could attest to this.
    — Jay Nordlinger, National Review, 27 Aug. 2020
  • The door locks sound like something out of a 1970s gulag.
    — Joel Feder, The Drive, 26 Mar. 2026
  • More than a million Uighur men and women have been thrown into this gulag.
    — Jay Nordlinger, National Review, 20 Oct. 2020
  • Stalin was a man of gulags and firing squads, a poster villain for the dangers posed by despots.
    — Jeffrey Fleishman, latimes.com, 6 Mar. 2018
  • Which came from legitimate business, so to speak, and which from a gulag camp?
    — Jay Nordlinger, National Review, 4 Feb. 2022
  • Somebody might end up in a gulag that way, and Matveev wasn’t interested.
    — Keith Gave, Detroit Free Press, 26 Mar. 2018
  • Here, the gulag is more than merely a memory, and a residual fear hangs in the air even today.
    — Anna Nemtsova, The Atlantic, 26 Oct. 2021
  • Hopper is far from dead, however, and is being held at an icy gulag in Russia.
    — Antonio Ferme, Variety, 15 May 2022
  • Or look at the man who, quite literally, wrote the book on the Soviet gulag.
    — Casey Michel, The New Republic, 4 Oct. 2022
  • He’s detained by the authorities, tortured, and sent to a gulag.
    — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 24 Jan. 2023
  • Does handing over two or three thousand dollars help fund the weapons program, gulag fence-mending or the purchase of medicine?
    — Siobhán O'Grady, Washington Post, 6 June 2018
  • This at a time when the penalty for such an offense could be death by execution, or almost certain death in the gulag.
    — Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review, 2 July 2019
  • Now as then, letters from the gulags tell of eternal winters, cold cells, and the longing for the first signs of greenery to appear amid the thaw.
    — Francesca Mastruzzo (tr. Elettra Pauletto), The Dial, 14 Jan. 2024
  • That is a memoir by Kang Chol-hwan about the North Korean gulag.
    — Jay Nordlinger, National Review, 15 Jan. 2025
  • The people who have those markers, who are seen as unsafe for a long time were being shipped off to a gulag of re-education centers.
    — CBS News, 4 Jan. 2023
  • His grandfather, a peasant, was declared an enemy of the working class and sent to one of this region's many gulag prison camps.
    — oregonlive, 5 Oct. 2019
  • New logo, the Siberian skyline, complete with smokestacks and gulags.
    — Paul Daugherty, Cincinnati.com, 27 June 2017
  • Many thousands of scientists were killed or sent to the gulag, where a significant percentage died.
    — Scott Montgomery, Forbes.com, 15 Sep. 2025
  • Landers, a professional actor, plays a ruthless guard who takes the audience to the gulag.
    — Cathy Kozlowicz, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 15 Sep. 2021
  • The people who are stuck in an old way of thinking, in 20th century frameworks, in gulag thinking, are missing what is going on.
    — Brian Stelter, CNN, 24 Feb. 2020
  • This former professor, a survivor of the Holocaust and gulags, is one of the collection’s highlights.
    — Leah Mirakhor, latimes.com, 8 June 2018
  • It was founded in the 1940s as a gulag camp for mining tin and uranium, where the prisoners died in great numbers.
    — New York Times, 22 Oct. 2021
  • Today tens of thousands of North Koreans are believed to languish in gulags and the state allows no dissent.
    — Jonathan Cheng, WSJ, 22 Sep. 2017
  • Near the base on Cape Chaplino, gulag labor crews were constructing a new city, Provideniya.
    — Longreads, 2 Mar. 2022
  • The rest of the world is looking at America and our growing immigration gulag and wondering what the hell happened here.
    — Will Bunch, Philly.com, 10 June 2018
  • Vladimir Putin's Russia has settled into one-man rule, minus perhaps the worst of the Soviet gulag state.
    — John C. “chuck” Chalberg, Star Tribune, 23 Jan. 2021
  • He was arrested and detained in Russia in 2019 and spent nearly three years in a Russian gulag.
    — Dallas News, 14 June 2022
  • The story unfolds within a grand but fading hotel; not quite Eloise at the Plaza, but far from Ivan Denisovich in the gulag.
    — New York Times, 18 June 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'gulag.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: