katorga

noun

1. A tsarist or Soviet labour camp.

   countable

   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.

2. Penal servitude in a Russian or Soviet labour camp.

   uncountable

   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.

Where it comes from

From Russian ка́торга (kátorga, “penal servitude”).

Adapted from the Wiktionary entry katorga (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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