The history of the Bulgarian forced-labor camps has yet to be written. To this day, there has been no systematic survey of what some have termed the Bulgarian 'gulag': a penal network, comprised of camps, prisons, temporary camp settlements, deportations and exile villages which existed in Bulgaria from the end of 1944 until the mid 1980s. This project is one of the first attempts at writing a comprehensive study of the Bulgarian camps and focuses on the turning points that led to the establishment and conditioning of specific features of the Bulgarian camp system by looking at the Belene and Lovech camp complexes. Two main research methods are employed: archival research into document collections and oral history interviews with former victims and perpetrators of the camp system.