The Gulag (Russian: ГУЛАГ, tr. GULAG; IPA: [ɡʊˈlak] ( listen)) was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems during the Stalin era, from the 1930s until the 1950s (although these forced labor camps continued to operate well into the 1980s). While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of extrajudicial punishment. The Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union, based on Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code). The term is also sometimes used to describe the camps themselves."GULAG" was the acronym for Гла́вное управле́ние лагере́й (Glavnoye upravleniye lagerey), the "Main Camp Administration". It was the short form of the official name Гла́вное управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х лагере́й и коло́ний (Glavnoye upravleniye ispravityelno-trudovykh lagerey i koloniy), the "Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Labor Settlements". It was administered first by the GPU, later by the NKVD and in the final years by the MVD, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. While the first corrective labour camps after the revolution were established in 1918 after the attempted assassination of Lenin, and the internment system grew rapidly, the Gulag was formally and legally created and recognized much later, on April 25, 1930, and formally dissolved on January 13, 1960. Several Soviet dissidents wrote about the continuation of the Gulag even after it was officially closed. Among them, Anatoli Marchenko (1938-1986), who actually died in the Gulag, demonstrated in his writings that the Soviet gulag had not ended with Joseph Stalin. Similar testimonies came from Soviet dissidents Vladimir Bukovsky, Yuri Orlov, Nathan Shcharansky, all of them released from the Gulag and given permission to emigrate in the West, after years of international pressure on Soviet authorities.Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eleven years in the Gulag, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, 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 described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death. Many scholars concur with this view, though some argue that the Gulag was less substantial than it is often presented, although during much of its history mortality was high.In March 1940, there were 53 Gulag camp directorates (colloquially referred to as simply "camps") and 423 labor colonies in the USSR. Today's major industrial cities of the Russian Arctic, such as Norilsk, Vorkuta, and Magadan, were originally camps built by prisoners and run by ex-prisoners.Unlike the concentration camp system of Nazi Germany, the Gulag did not have death camps, in the sense of deliberate "death-inducing camps" established to murder a whole segment of the population. Rather, Gulag camps could be described as "locations which had different degrees of death inducement [in the form of starvation, disease, etc.] at different times". But the Gulag consisted of many more camps with many more prisoners over many more years than the Nazi concentration camp system did.