A friend on a mailing list pointed out something I didn’t know: “GULAG” is an acronym for “Glavnoe Upravlenie LAGerei,” meaning “Chief Administration of Camps.”
I haven’t read it, but Anne Applebaum’s new book GULAG: a History is supposed to be good.
<http://www.anneapplebaum.com/gulag/intro.html> <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0767900561/peterkaminski-20>
Russian is so much nicer to look at in Cyrillic, so I found RusFon (trialware, Windows) to un-romanize “Glavnoe Upravlenie LAGerei”. It’s $40, a bit steep for casual playing around with, and the interface is in German, so I don’t think I’ll keep it, but it’s nice to know it exists.
