ИСТИНА

The paper observes the questions most frequently discussed in the Russian publications on Gulag activities: Labor organization and productivity; stimulation of prisoners’ work; prisoners’ everyday life, relations between political and criminal prisoners as well as with “free labor” workers and camp administration; principal-agent problem in controlling the efficiency of camps’ economic activities; financial aspects of Gulag economy, impossibility to provide its own self-sufficiency; resistance in postwar camps; specific conditions in special (osobye) camps; role of the Gulag in construction of industrial enterprises, railways and highways, hydro-electric stations and canals, in mining and forestry; “social portrait” of people repressed in the period of the “Great Terror” (some of whom were sent to Gulag camps); “Sharashki”.