So I'm going to answer very specifically about the situation faced by women in the Gulags, since by chance I came across a paper on the topic when trying to dig up more information for a different answer I was working on. It wasn't useful at the time, but can put it to use now.

Simply put, being a woman inside the Gulag system - where they made up around 30 percent of the population in the immediate post-war period (likely due to prisoners being sent to the front) and 17 percent by 1951 - was not pleasant, and that is the most pleasant way to word it. Sexual violence from both guards and prisoners was a common occurrence, and even if not raped, many women found themselves with no other option than to sell themselves for food or other improvements in their conditions. That isn't to say that all relationships were coercive of course, but it was an ever present concern for a woman consigned to the Gulag system.

In theory there were very strict prohibitions on any heterosexual sexual relations, but enforcement was often nearly non-existent, if nothing else since in many cases the guards who ought to have doing so were indulging themselves. Homosexual relations - consensual or otherwise - seem to have been less of a concern despite homosexuality being criminalized. The minders of the Gulag system were, in theory, more aggressive in prohibiting heterosexual relations because pregnant women were less effective labor and took up more resources. Of course, the fact that many of the work camps included maternity wards and nurseries illustrates the extent to which the flouting of the rules were acknowledged.

As I noted above, the type of relationships really ran the gamut, from violent rapes, to real, loving relationships. And on the latter end of the spectrum, it should be additionally said, that memoirists who survived the camp system often seem to describe those sexual relationships as a form of resistance and reclaiming their humanity: Bell provides a good summing up of this variety thus:

Sexual violence was frequent, as was sexual barter, whether involving guards or other officials offering women better rations in exchange for sex, or camp “marriages,” in which the “husband” protects the “wife” in exchange for sex. But several memoirists of the Gulag also point out that authentically romantic relationships were not uncommon in the camps. [...] Hava Volovich, a prisoner of a camp in the Komi Republic and later of various Siblag satellite camps, describes wanting to become pregnant in the camps as a way to feel more human and writes that the sex drive was “the only thing that these stock-breeders from hell could not exterminate.”

Of course, a lot of the literature which does touch on sex focuses less on relationships and more on the use of it as a battering tool. Favors from prisoners could be secured, and better treatment by the guards as well. And although it is easy to see such transactions as essentially coercive due to the wider circumstances, while certainly true in some cases, researchers of women in camp systems such as the Stalinist Gulags or Nazi Concentration camps contend that doing so denies the women agency. Bell draws on the work of Anna Hájková regarding sexual barter in Theresienstadt ghetto, to note:

While rape and sexual violence occurred, [Anna] Hájková contends that sexual barter was something different, a way for women to improve their situation by using their own sexuality. Heterosexual sexuality was thus a crucial component of the functional economy of the Theresienstadt ghetto. Sexual barter, Hájková insists, is different from though often related to prostitution. Because no one was in Theresienstadt voluntarily, we must understand that the choices people made took place within a society that operated under formal and informal rules different from those of a free society.

In theory, men and women were supposed to be separated, but even in cases where housing zones weren't properly segregated (as was often the case), it was usually simple enough to secretly slip through or bribe a guard to allow passage to the male zone or visa versa. And as the camps themselves were almost always mixed gender even if divided by gender, there was plenty of overlap. Belovodsk Camp, for example, had "the kitchen, the bathhouse, the medical unit and the administration office" all within the men's zone. Cohabitation was strictly forbidden, and in some cases punished, but there was a very uneven enforcement, and it seems likely that in many cases couples would live together full time despite the theoretical division of the camps.

Bell, Wilson T. 2015. Sex, pregnancy, and power in the late stalinist gulag. Journal of the History of Sexuality 24, (2) (05): 198-224

This is one of those questions that's pretty hard to answer in any depth, because the enormity of the experience is massive. The answer is: terrible. The "political" prisoners (the zeks) were the lowest rung on the Gulag power structure, under the criminals ("blue caps") who were given considerable leeway and power, and the guards. Food, clothing, even the tools necessary to do the labor were few and far between. The camp administrators themselves were under pressure to complete labor assignments (which could be impossible, per the quota system) with few resources other than virtually unlimited human labor. So you can imagine how well that worked out for the human labor. (And if the bosses failed, they knew they might end up in the Gulag as well!)

Gulag prisoner accounts invariable involve impossible, backbreaking labor. Example: you are assigned a quota of trees to knock down each day, and to fail at your quota might lead to your not getting food. A caveat: you are not given tools other than ropes, and you are expected to basically "shake" the trees down using nothing but the strength of a gang of underfed fellow prisoners. Good luck!

Another example: dig a canal in rock-hard permafrost. Your only tools are wooden, you do not even have access to wheelbarrows, unless you can build them yourselves, on site. A favorite quote of mine on this from Solzhenitsyn: "it would be, unjust, most unjust, unfair, to compare this most savage construction project of the twentieth century, this continental canal built 'with wheelbarrow and pick,' with the Egyptian pyramids; after all, the pyramids were built with, the contemporary technology!! And we used the technology of forty centuries earlier!" (This section concerns the infamous White Sea Canal, built with Gulag labor at an impossible, incredible pace, at great human cost. How'd they get it done on time? The bosses cut corners, making it too shallow for actual heavy use. Which is a great Gulag labor.)

They also involve maddening bureaucracy and transfer between prisons. You are destined for a camp, but instead need to be shuffled through other camps, prisons, and way-stations. You may be forgotten about in one for several months. You are crammed into tiny cells without beds.

And we aren't even talking about the experience of getting into the Gulag, which can involve torture, forced confessions, death sentences (usually commuted — they want your labor, not your head!), mind games, terrible conditions.

What am I leaving out? Disease. Starvation. Rape (see /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov's comment). Bullying, thieving, and violence from the "blue caps." Cruelty. Loss of hope. But again, the focus is labor: a drum-beat of labor. These were labor camps, not death camps. If you die, well, there were a lot of replacements. But the goal was to dig canals, chop forests, mine ore, including uranium. (And as you can imagine, the mines were considered one of the worst assignments.)

It's worth noting that being a political prisoner at that point did not mean you had any political principles or ideals. It might just mean you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, were friends with someone else who got labeled as a "political" and named you (because they had to name names), or even might have been unlucky enough to have seen Europe during World War II, and deemed too unreliable as a result of having seen the West. So it's not like you likely have ideals to fall back on. You were probably, in your heart, a loyal Communist! By the 1950s you would not have had many other options on your mind. And now, now you're in the Gulag. Maybe even loyal soldier in the Great Patriotic War! There must be some misunderstanding. But you quickly find that this is all too common a situation.

The above doesn't do the experience any justice. If you at all curious about this, read accounts by Gulag survivors. Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is the classic — read it for the experiences, not necessarily the history (he was piecing this together from very limited sources; if you want the "history" side of things, Applebaum's Gulag: A History is great, but Solzhenitsyn's original is ideal for understanding the "experience"), feel free to skip the parts that are digressions about the Soviet legal system (there is an abridged edition that cuts a lot of the "slow" parts out). If you are looking for something a little less daunting (Solzhenitsyn is a classic "super long book" Russian writer), Shalamov's Kolyma Tales are semi-fictional short stories written by a Gulag survivor (a survivor of the Siberian Kolyma region, where annual mortality from cold alone was ~25%). Warning: the stories are pitch black dark.

If you are curious about what these things looked like from an administrator's perspective (though I would only read this after looking at a prisoner's perspective), Mochulsky's Gulag Boss is a fascinating memoir. The basic argument is that the Gulag bosses were usually just trying to do their best, that they were, in a sense, prisoners of the Stalinist system as well (nobody wanted to be in a Gulag — it was better for bosses and guards, to be sure, but it was still a pretty terrible place to be). Obviously there is a self-serving aspect to this, but it fleshes out dynamics of the system nicely, and substantiates the idea (which Solzhenitsyn understood, as well) that everyone in the Gulag system was, in some sense, compromised by the system itself.

I want to add to the interesting answers above to note that the situation in 1952 would have been distinctive in a few ways. First, it marked the absolute height of the population in the Gulag system. Following World War II, while Stalin was still alive, the population of the gulag camps peaked due to waves of so-called nationalists being sent there (as the USSR established control of the newly-ish acquired, or re-acquired Baltic and western Ukrainian regions), along with waves of people deemed collaborators, who may have worked with or under the Nazi occupiers in someway. The result of this spike in population was that almost every Gulag camp was overcrowded. It also meant that, because so many people were deported for showing nationalist sentiment, for the first time nationalism seems to have governed the experience of people in the camps. This means that if you were deported for being too pro-nationalistically Lithuanian, when you got to the camps you would find other Lithuanians who would welcome you and embrace you into their subgroup. This tended to subdivide the political prisoners by nationality in a way that did not happen prior to World War II. Also, in part because of this overcrowding, and in part because of long-term problems with the funding of the Gulag system, there were riots in uprisings in 1953 – the year of Stalin's death. (see for example the Norlisk camp system, which had the first and one of the largest revolts against particularly terribly conditions, apparently led by a group of Ukrainian nationalists.) As a result of these problems with the system, as soon as Stalin died, reforming the Gulag system – which included releasing large numbers of prisoners – became a key priority. I bring up these factors to point out that the experience a political prisoner would have had in 1952 is not necessarily typical of the experience a prisoner would've had in 1932 or 1942. The system was not monolithic, and the prisoner experience in different eras usually reflected the priorities of the government of the time, and in particular the fears and perceived enemies of the government. Sources: Gregory & Lazarev, Ed. The Economics of Forced Labour; Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society

What are the odds of getting out alive? Am I basically in for life or does one generally get released at some point?