People always say things like this about despotic regimes while they're in power. Yet, every time they fall, we almost invariably learn that things were actually much worse.
Like, I remember in the original gulf war, we were told that soldiers were taking infants out of incubators at leaving them on the floor. An Iraqi refugee testified before congress that this was happening. Turned out to be total bullshit.
"Everytime" as the OP says is too strong. But we have often learned that things were bad beyond belief, as in the Holodomor and The Great Chinese Famine.
Also with Iraq there were incredible actions carried out against the Marsh Arabs and the Kurds and also chemical weapons were used by Saddam Hussein. The thing was a lot, perhaps the worst, were carried out when Hussein was an ally of the West against Iran.
Both sides are full of examples, the same thing happened before both Iraq wars but at the same time there were vocal doubters of the early information about the Rwandan genocide and the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge.
We can never be certain how bad things are, but we do know how bad countries look after US intervention.
> In her 1974 memoir, ''Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn'' (Bobbs-Merrill), she wrote that she was ''perplexed'' that the West had accepted ''The Gulag Archipelago'' as ''the solemn, ultimate truth,'' saying its significance had been ''overestimated and wrongly appraised.''
> Pointing out that the book's subtitle is ''An Experiment in Literary Investigation,'' she said that her husband did not regard the work as ''historical research, or scientific research.'' She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ''camp folklore,'' containing ''raw material'' which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.
That book was quite literally written by the KGB [0], and his (ex-)wife had KGB ties [1].
From [1]:
>In 1974, shortly before The Gulag Archipelago was due to appear, Natalya Reshetovskaya was recruited by the KGB to try and persuade Solzhenitsyn not to publish.
That's all according to a defector (which brings us back to the original conversation) and a member of MI5. The notes that form the basis of those claims are still classified.
I was born in USSR, and lived in it enough to be able to reassure you it was not possible to publish a book there in 1974 just because you decided it for yourself. Even authors of fairytales were forced to make ideological "corrections", not to mention anything even distantly political.
Solzhenitsyn's typist hanged herself after she was compelled to give up one of three extant drafts of the book to the KGB. Who would do that over a collection of "camp folklore"?
Like, I remember in the original gulf war, we were told that soldiers were taking infants out of incubators at leaving them on the floor. An Iraqi refugee testified before congress that this was happening. Turned out to be total bullshit.