Joseph Stalin established Gulags to ...

The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps established during Joseph Stalin's long reign as dictator of the Soviet Union.

Joseph Stalin established Gulags so that criminals, political prisoners, and any citizen in general who opposed the regime in the Soviet Union were subjected to forced labor as punishment for their insubordination.

Explanation:

Gulag is an acronym in Russian for Central Field Administration. These were prison camps where detainees were punished with forced labor, physical and psychological torture.

The Gulags had achieved their success under Stalin from 1929-1953 and declined after the death of the Soviet dictator. However, they were officially abolished only in Gorbachev's government in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union began to open to the world.

Initially, only people considered "enemies of the people" were sent to the Gulags. The first prisoners belonged to specific classes such as the bourgeois, priests, landowners, and royalists. There were also those who were suspected only of their origins as Jews, Chechens, and Georgians.

During the Great Purge, carried out by Stalin between 1934-1939, the profiles of the prisoners changed and any citizen accused of making the slightest criticism of the regime was condemned to the Gulag.