During World War II, many soldiers believed to be responsible for the initial Red Army defeats were sent to these camps — as were soldiers like Ivan Denisovich, who had allowed himself to be taken prisoner, and men like Solzhenitsyn who had made critical remarks about Stalin or the Communist Party, and many civilians who had lived "in contact with" the enemy during the Nazi occupation. After the war, they were joined by soldiers who had had contact with the Allies, now the enemy. Captain Buynovsky, whose crime was that he had been assigned as a liaison officer to the British Navy and had received a commendation for his services, is one such example in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In addition, members of former independent countries like Latvia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine, all of whom were now satellite republics of the USSR, as well as other ethnic and national minorities, were interned in these labor camps in large numbers.
Solzhenitsyn describes the history, the methods, and the structure of these forced labor camps in great detail in his long, multi-volume work, The Gulag Archipelago. While Article 58 was repealed in 1958 in the course of a complete revision of the Penal Code, Solzhenitsyn maintains that the GULAG still exists and has, with the addition of the sentences to psychiatric clinics, grown even more vicious.
