If you think typography doesn't matter, think about how much meaning can be contained in a simple dash.
Look carefully at the last row of this table.
What do you think the dash in the second column means?
Each line is an administrative region of the Soviet Union. The two grouped sections are regions of Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
The last line is a little different. Лагеря НКВД [ru]. What could it mean? Well let's see what the table is about. It's an executive order, listing quotas of people to either execute (first column) or send to the Лагеря НКВД [ru] (second column). The third column is the total.
The order is signed by Николай Иванович Ежов, the chief of that same НКВД, under orders from Иосиф Сталин.
Лагеря is the plural of Лагер, which is literally the German word Lager [de], as in Konzentrationslager [de].
НКВД's Lagers: the concentration camps administered by the NKVD, Stalin's political police, also known as the Gulag. The term Gulag is a semi-acronym, ГУЛаг, in which Лаг is short for Lager: it means simply the Main Administration of the Lagers -- of the concentration camps.
The Czechs, who suffered both German and Russian flavors of socialist totalitarianism, also refer to those camps as lágr [cs], directly borrowed from German, and use the term to refer to both versions of the totalitarian camps. In some cases, the very same camps, conveniently placed close to uranium mines, switched directly from the National Socialist to the Socialist regime*. The term can also be applied to North Korea's contemporary concentration camps.
So the last line is the camps itself, hence the dash: even among the zek population, there were still death quotas to be met (to pick among those lucky enough to have survived transportation, extreme cold, hunger, maltreatment, and a work sometimes consisting of literally digging a useless canal with bare hands).
Does it make sense to list it as a region? Well Солженицын thought so: in his magnum opus [la] Архипелаг ГУЛАГ [ru] (it only rhymes in Russian), he describes the camp system as a separate country, a chain of islands:
Мы поняли потому, что сами были из тех присутствующих, из того единственного на земле могучего племени зэков, которое только и могло охотно съесть тритона.
А Колыма была — самый крупный и знаменитый остров, полюс лютости этой удивительной страны ГУЛАГ, географией разодранной в архипелаг, но психологией скованной в континент, — почти невидимой, почти неосязаемой страны, которую и населял народ зэков.
We understood because we ourselves were the same kind of people as those present at that event. We, too, were from that powerful tribe of zeks, unique on the face of the earth, the only people who could devour prehistoric salamander with relish.
And the Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent — an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people.
The Czech translation of the same passage is also interesting:
Pochopili jsme to proto, že jsme sami patřili k oněm přítomným, k onomu mohutnému, na celé zeměkouli ojedinělému kmeni zeků neboli muklů, kteří jedině byli s to s chutí pozřít mloka.
Kolyma byla největší a nejproslulejší ostrov, pól krutosti oné podivné země Gulag, roztříštěné svou geografií na souostroví, avšak stmelené svou psychologií v kontinent, oné skoro neviditelné a nehmatatelné země, jež byla zalidněna národem zeků.
It introduces an alternate term for zek, mukl, which is a reverse acronym for muž určený k likvidaci [cs] (man destined for liquidation), and was used in relation to the Czechoslovak equivalent of the Gulag, the TNPs.
How did you immigrate into this particular country? Well, as Солженицын says, the fastest way was through арест [ru] -- arrest in English, same Old French etymology through German. But how to get arrested? Well, you had to become an enemy of the people (враг народа), ideally an enemy of the workers (враг трудящихся). The concept dates back all the way to the Roman republic (hostis publicus [la]), but was undoubtedly given its lettres de noblesse [fr] through Robespierre as ennemi du peuple [fr] during la Terreur [fr].
How did you become an enemy of the people? Well that was quite easy -- only three people to convince (or at least two of them!), a тройка [ru] or trojka [cs], which somehow were considered valid representatives of The Will of The People -- a linguistic anti-concept in itself.
* The Czechoslovak uranium mines were of strategic importance both to the National Socialists and the Soviet Socialists. The Czechoslovak production was directly shipped to the Soviet Union, of course. Political prisoners were literally worked to death, mining and sorting uranium without any special protective clothes. The same policy was practiced in the Soviet Union itself:
Under the supervision of Lavrenty Beria who headed both NKVD and the Soviet atom bomb program until his demise in 1953, thousands of zeks (Gulag inmates) were used to mine uranium ore and prepare test facilities on Novaya Zemlya, Vaygach Island, Semipalatinsk, among other sites.
Of course, there was some consistency in that: the environment wasn't treated any better, as shown by disasters such as Lake Karachay and Kyshtym. And what could make more sense than to destroy the environment and use up antisocialist workers, in order to build an atomic program based on technology stolen from the capitalists, in order to prove the superiority of socialism over capitalism? And what could be more consistent than to literally murder people by making them mine uranium, in order to build weapons of mass destruction such as to be able to potentially murder even more people, not to mention a nuclear apocalypse and quasi-annihilation of the human species? The ends are the means, товарищ [ru].