Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, who survived eight years of Gulag incarceration, gave the term its international repute with the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973. The author likened the scattered camps to “a chain of islands”, and as an eyewitness, he described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death

A punishment cell block in one of the subcamps of Vorkutlag, 1945 The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union. The camps housed both ordinary criminals and political prisoners, a large number of whom were convicted in accordance with simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas or other instruments of extrajudicial punishment. The agency was established in 1930 and initially was administered by the OGPU (1923–1934), later known as the NKVD (1934–1946) and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in the final years. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag

Oh no not economics they were very stable economically due to the planned economy.

Best US president is a bit far

Gulags?

To be fair the USSR was pretty fucked up