The USSR at least pushed hard for science, engineering and technology education. Political party type and organization aside, the rapid growth of their electrical grid and large-scale engineering projects (hydroelectric dams, airports, nuclear power, hospitals etc) in the post-1945 era was quite rapid.
The Khmer Rouge and its strongly anti-intellectual stance was quite the opposite. You can't return an entire country to an agrarian subsistence agriculture system and literally kill off every educated person that can be found, and expect good results...
Much of the "progress" in the USSR was based on slave labour [1]. And it was not limited to just physical labour. Many intellectual feats were also the product of people working in, what essentially amounts to, a prison [2].
According to this study [0] the gulag deaths were approximately 830,000 from 1934 to 1953. It is important to know however that 70% of the deaths occurred between 1941 and 1944 (included) so they can kinda be attributed to difficulties from War Period. Also, it's important to note that antibiotics didn't become available until after WW2.
To put things into perspective, I have an interesting comparison for you. Using the same source as above for the USSR, and this report [1] from the Bureau of Justice Statistics we can say that Mortality in the gulag in 1953 (236 deaths per 100,000 prisoners) was lower than mortality in US prisons today, both in state prisons (303 deaths per 100,000 prisoners) and federal prisons (252 deaths per 100,000 prisoners).
A close friend's father was one of the persons to return from Gulag. He was one of the few people that buried the rest of the camp, due to him being immune to whatever disease that killed everyone else. Survived, came back and conceived my friend, all thanks to a lucky mutation somewhere.
that atrocities are not the domain of any particular political or economic ideology or system, but rather a danger that we need to fight against actively everywhere, and now.
According to the BJS data sheet linked in grandparent, the leading causes of death in prison for 2016 are:
- Cancer (1,128)
- Heart Disease (1,025)
- All Other Illnesses (525)
- Liver Disease (260)
Cancer and Heart Disease are also the leading causes of death for people not in prison. I don't think this is at all convincing evidence of an "atrocity."
As far as I understand it they also in many cases virtually held scientists or their families hostage to the outcome. Fail and you or your family gets sent to the gulags. One example is Yuri Gagarin's cosmonaut partner and his getting burned on re-entry due to rushing things to get under a deadline to avoid “consequences”.
Or if not sent to the gulags, sent back to a much lower standard of living. People with the equivalent of masters degrees in electrical engineering, aerospace, structural engineering etc could expect to have a fairly decent apartment, chance to get in the waiting list to acquire a family car, and other "high standard of living" compared to persons working in a manual labor job. Fail at whatever scientific or engineering endeavor your project was working on, and expect to lose your nice apartment and benefits...
They were particularly encouraging of scientific endeavors that contributed to national posterity over other nations and disregarded the rest. Intellectual pursuits in politics and really any criticism of government or social norms could get one easily disappeared.
> the rapid growth of their electrical grid and large-scale engineering projects (hydroelectric dams, airports, nuclear power, etc) in the post-1945 era was quite rapid.
In the 1920s and 1930s, 2,000 writers, intellectuals, and artists were imprisoned and 1,500 died in prisons and concentration camps. After sunspot development research was judged un-Marxist, twenty-seven astronomers disappeared between 1936 and 1938.
[...]
Official figures put the total number of documentable executions during the years 1937 and 1938 at 681,692,[1][92] in addition to 136,520 deaths in the Gulag;[3] whereas the total estimate of deaths brought about by Soviet repression during the Great Purge ranges from 950,000 to 1.2 million
The Soviet universities also had Marxist agriculture departments that guaranteed year after year of food shortages due to "bad weather". Anyone who disagreed was purged until only Marxists, whom they defined as the only true "intellectuals", remained.
True anti-intellectualism is when you don't allow intellectual debate. It doesn't require emptying the universities entirely. It is sufficient to empty them of anyone who doesn't sufficiently support the mandated opinions. You can then define those politically pure supporters as the "intellectuals" and anyone who doesn't go along with them as, by definition, "anti-intellectual". You then have an anti-intellectual system where intellectual debate has been silenced, but the universities remain open and anyone who disputes their pronouncements is on the outside and is called "anti-intellectual".
The Khmer Rouge and its strongly anti-intellectual stance was quite the opposite. You can't return an entire country to an agrarian subsistence agriculture system and literally kill off every educated person that can be found, and expect good results...