katorga

Noun

katorga (countable and uncountable, plural katorgas)

1. (countable) A tsarist or Soviet labour camp.
   • Each subsequent victory drove fresh contingents of the doomed into katorga or to the gallows— […] On the heels of the army came the tribunals, publicly hanging some people on the spot, dispatching others to the newly created katorga forced-labor camps.1978, Aleksandr I[sayevich] Solzhenitsyn, “The Doomed”, in Harry Willetts, transl., The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation: V–VII, New York, N.Y.; Evanston, Ill....
2. (uncountable) Penal servitude in a Russian or Soviet labour camp.
   • Sentenced to ten years of hard labor in the Siberian mines, he defied the Russian tyrant by his funeral oration at the grave of Dmokhovsky, his boldness resulting in an additional fifteen years of katorga.1912, Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist
   • However, brutal floggings, increased terms of katorga, starvation diets, permanent chaining to a wheelbarrow and other fearsome sanctions failed to staunch the flow.1991, Alan Wood, “Russia’s ‘Wild East’: exile, vagrancy and crime in nineteenth-century Siberia”, in Alan Wood, editor, The History of Siberia: From Russian Conquest to Revolution, London; New York...