GULAG is the Russian acronym for the Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps made famous and permanently inscribed into the English vocabulary through the genius of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his classic, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, published in 1974. The author used the testimony of 227 survivors as well as recollections of his own 11 years of labour camps and exiles. The Archipelago of Solzhenitsyn's work is that system of secret police installations, camp prisons, transit centers, communication facilities, transport systems and espionage organizations which, in his view, was a state within a state holding about 15 million people. The book shows how ordinary people, who are referred to by their own names, can be turned into planners and executives of oppression, brutality and torture.