a Russian term whose meanings include the following: (1) a station (etap prison) where convicts stopped for the day or spent the night on their way to Siberia or to exile in their native villages, (2) the distance between two etapy (usually 15 to 25 versts), (3) a group of convicts (60 to 100 persons in Siberia; 20 to 60 persons in European Russia) with a convoy.

First attested in Russia in the early 19th century, etap became an official term when M. M. Speranskii used it in his Statute on the Etaps in the Siberian Provinces, which was adopted on July 22, 1822. The etap system existed in Russia until the bourgeois democratic revolution of February 1917.