Another historically significant example of forced labour was that of political prisoners and other persecuted people in labour camps , especially in totalitarian regimes since the 20th century where millions of convicts were exploited and often killed by hard labour and bad living conditions . For much of the history of the Soviet Union and other Communist states , political opponents of these governments were often sentenced to forced labour camps . The Soviet Gulag camps were a continuation of the punitive labour system of Imperial Russia known as '' katorga '' , but on a larger scale . Most inmates in the Gulag were ordinary criminals : between 1934 and 1953 there were only two years , 1946 and 1947 , when the number of counter-revolutionary prisoners exceeded that of ordinary criminals , partly because the Soviet state had amnestied 1 million ordinary criminals as part of the victory celebrations in 1945 . At the height of the purges in the 1930s political prisoners made up 12 percent of the camp population ; at the time of Joseph Stalin 's death just over one-quarter . In the 1930s , many ordinary criminals were guilty of crimes that would have been punished with a fine or community service in the 1920s . They were victims of harsher laws from the early 1930s , driven , in part , by the need for more prison camp labor
purges
Great Purge
Penal labour