We have all heard the horror stories (well, at least i have), that the gulags, especially the ones under Stalin, were a little better if not worse then the concentration camps under Nazi Germany. I however, am very skeptical of this, as i read from somewhere (i forget the source) that the gulags had a drastically low mortality rate compared to the Nazi death camps. This leads me to my question, how bad were the gulags in the Soviet Union?
The Soviet prison camp system certainly wasn't in the same tier as the Nazi death camps. The Gulag system wasn't being run as some sneaky way to kill people off, they were expected (for practical and ideological reasons) to actually produce things (in the Stalin era they got quotas, just like other sectors). This isn't to say there weren't a lot of deaths, but much of this is to do with bad planning or essentially an attitude of not caring what happened to the inmates. Consider the now notorious incident at Nazino Island (or if you prefer, Cannibal Island...), this wasn't a result of the NKVD decided to let the inmates starve/eat each, but a result of a badly thought out idea to create a new camp in a remote area, without enough food or other resources (including it would seem, guards).
Calculating the exact mortality rate of the Soviet camp system is made a bit difficult as there was a practice of releasing terminally ill inmates early... so the camp might work you half to death then release you... but your death doesn't actually get recorded as in the camp.
The condition of the Soviet labour camp system varied quite a bit over time and even from place to place. As you might imagine there was quite a lot of 'pressure' on the camp system in the 1930s during the purges (more inmates, but also a mania for economic growth and hence higher quotas), WWII (food shortages) and immediately after WWII. The post-WWII era highlights how varied conditions between camps could be - areas with tougher regimes were created specifically for people the party-state felt needed to be particularly punished. Conversely you have the sharashka's (think I spelt that right), where inmates were picked to engage in or continue scientific and technical work - the inmates in these locations were treated a lot better (and threatened with being returned to the general camp population if they didn't behave). From memory Solzhenitsyn ended up in one of these.
Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History covers most of this if you wanted to read into it. Despite a fairly polemical intro the author stays reasonably fair in the 'guts' of the book. I currently have Fyodor Mochulsky's Gulag Boss on my list of books I need to get around to reading - you've probably seen more than a few accounts from the inmates, but Gulag Boss offers a different perspective, that of a camp administrator.
Hope that helps.