History Main / TheGulag

* ''ComicBook/TheWarlordDC'': Mariah returns to the USSR decdes after she left and is arrested as a Western spy and sent to the Gulag. A later arc involves her escaping and attempting to return to Skataris.

Note that a similar labor camp system existed in UsefulNotes/TsaristRussia, but it was only used to imprison actual revolutionaries (and criminals), not merely tellers of anti-Tsar jokes. It ''supposedly'' was also much nicer -- Lenin himself noted that it was one of the best times of his life, with the rich Siberian countryside doing wonders for his health and lax policing leaving plenty of time for the revolutionary prisoners to fraternize and catch up on their reading. When he and the Bolsheviks took over, they went out of their way to show those incompetent Tsarists how prison camps are supposed to be run, by basing all sentences on the harshest Tsarist "katorga" regimes. In the post-WWII period, even the actual word "katorga" was revived for a brief time.

* On ''Series/TheXFiles'', Mulder and Kryczek are both sent to one of these. (Bizarrely, the series takes place ''after'' the Soviet era.) It turns out that [[spoiler:the Black Oil is being tested on human subjects there. Mulder and Kryczek are both exposed.]]
* ''Series/TheTwilightZone1985'': In "Red Snow", KGB Colonel Ilyanov is sent to a gulag in Siberia to investigate the mysterious deaths of the local Communist Party secretary Vladimir Borisov and the first KGB investigator Major Yuri Andreev. As soon as Ilyanov arrives, he finds the conditions to be even worse than he imagined as it is wintertime and there is no sunlight from October to April. He later discovers that the townspeople have an arrangement with a group of vampires to protect them from danger and that it was the vampires who killed Borisov and Andreev.

* ''Film/TheWayBack'' is a story about a group of escaped gulag prisoners trekking entirely on foot through the wilderness of Siberia, Mongolia and China to escape the territory of the USSR and have a shot at returning to their homeland.

*** They even made up a special diagnosis for it, called [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia sluggish schizophrenia or slow progressive schizophrenia]], on the "logic" that anyone willing to give up their happiness, family, friends, etc. to believe something so different from those around them obviously was insane and probably would show symptoms of schizophrenia eventually, hence the name: a form of schizophrenia suffered by people who have yet to actually show any symptoms of schizophrenia outside of "anti-Soviet thoughts" or "delusions of reformism", because, according to the Soviets, it took a long time for the normal symptoms associated with schizophrenia to start showing. For obvious reasons, this has never been recognized by any country or international organization outside of the Communist Bloc.

*** They even made up a special diagnosis for it, called [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia sluggish schizophrenia or slow progressive schizophrenia]], on the "logic" that anyone willing to give up their happiness, family, friends, etc. to believe something so different from those around them obviously was insane and probably would show symptoms of schizophrenia eventually, hence the name: a form of schizophrenia suffered by people who have yet to actually show any symptoms of schizophrenia outside of "anti-Soviet thoughts" or "delusions of reformism", because, according to the Soviets, it took a long time for the normal symptoms associated with schizophrenia to start showing. For obvious reasons, this has never been recognized by any country or international organization outside of the Soviet Union.

* In ''ComicBook/TheWarlord'', Mariah returns to the USSR decdes after she left and is arrested as a Western spy and sent to the Gulag. A later arc involves her escaping and attempting to return to Skataris.
* In ''ComicBook/SupermanRedSon'', Superman finds his childhood friend has been sent to a gulag, so he goes to free her, but he is too late, and she dies. [[spoiler:A young boy from the same gulag becomes enraged that it took Superman so long to stop the atrocities at the camp, and became a vengeful Batman.]]

* ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Back The Way Back]]'' is another Gulag escape story.

* ''VideoGame/TeamFortress2'' (a game that takes place around the 1960's-70's) acknowledges this as [[DarkAndTroubledPast the backstory]] of [[HuskyRusskie The Heavy Weapons Guy]]. In 1941, his "counter-revolutionary" father was executed, with Heavy, his mother, and his sisters sent to a Siberian gulag for three months. Details are sketchy, in part [[BerserkButton because Heavy doesn't like talking about the time]], but he and his family escaped along with all its prisoners after it was destroyed in an attack.

->'''Anya Amasova: I took a survival course in Siberia.