gulag
Other forms: gulags
In the 20th century, the gulag was a system of Russian camps where political prisoners were sent to do forced labor. Officially, the last gulag closed in the 1950s.
During the regimes of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union used gulags across the country to imprison political enemies. The entire system was known as the Gulag, an acronym from Russian that roughly translates to "Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps." Each individual prison camp was also referred to as a gulag. Some historians estimate that 14 million people were forced to labor in gulags, some for crimes as petty as joking about the Soviet government.
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You'll be a vocabulary tsar once you review these words related to Russia. In addition to learning about the climate, biomes, and natural resources of Russia, you'll explore Russian history from the Russian Empire to communism and the Cold War.
Words from Round 2 of the 2015 Scripps National Spelling Bee. Full list is here.
Putin invades Crimea. Kermit the Frog goes to Siberia (where Tina Fey is prison warden). Journalists tweet pics of brown water flowing from faucets in Soviet-reminiscent Sochi hotel rooms. Wes Anderson enshrines that concept via "The Grand Budapest Hotel." Meanwhile Cold War history series "The Americans" is signed to a third season on FX. Call it War on Terror fatigue, ascribe it to fashion's habit of looking back, just don't try to deny it. The Cold War is hot right now, and so are the words in this list. (For words on this list originating from Russian, we reference Wikipedia's entry for List of English words of Russian origin.)