Gulags were forced labour camps in which country?

The Gulag was the government agency in charge of the Soviet network of forced labour camps set up by order of Vladimir Lenin, reaching its peak during Joseph Stalin's rule from the 1930s to the early 1950s. English-language speakers also use the word gulag to refer to all forced-labour camps that existed in the Soviet Union, including camps that existed in the post-Lenin era.

The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union. The camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners.

Some suggest that 14 million people were imprisoned in the Gulag labour camps from 1929 to 1953 (the estimates for the period 1918–1929 are more difficult to calculate). Other calculations, by historian Orlando Figes, refer to 25 million prisoners of the Gulag in 1928–1953. A further 6–7 million were deported and exiled to remote areas of the USSR, and 4–5 million passed through labour colonies, plus 3.5 million who were already in, or who had been sent to, labour settlements.