[poweronselftest]

> What is a gulag? It's a penal colony or a labor camp or a prison.

If only. Never thought I would see gulag apologism, but I am not surprised.

I guess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varlam_Shalamov was a facist anti-semite, too.

PS. Nice touch with the whattaboutism.

PSS. As a Jew I just love when antisemitism is invoked in character assassinations. Makes me feel loved, valued and most all: protected! ;)

[JPKab]

The comment you are replying to was rife with absolute inaccuracies. I can assure you you won't get anywhere trying to argue against that person.

Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned by Stalin because while on the front lines fighting against the Nazis he wrote a letter that was intercepted with statements in it critical of Stalin's poor execution in supplying the army. The parent commenter doesn't even get this basic fact right and flips it on its head. Denial effects like this are the mark of a true ideologue, and as you pointed out the whataboutism is also a tale for cognitive dissonance. And the dismissive attitude towards gulags is also indicative of somebody shutting out information that would undermine a fragile ego clinging to ideology for purpose.

[mushbino]

What part is inaccurate and where did I say anything contradicting what you're saying? I've studied Russian history for many years. We know much more about the gulags since Glasnost and the opening of the archives. We can now compare actual numbers against Solzhenitsyn's. I've studied this quite a bit and could go on forever, but here's a link to one post on AskHistorians: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3j2un8/is_so...

The biggest specialist in this subject, Viktor Zemskov, who worked in the Soviet archives in the period of 'Perestroika' gives the following facts1 "In 1937 there were 1,196,369 prisoners and 87% of them were ordinary non-political criminals like thieves, cons, etc. In 1938 in GULAG were 1,881,570 prisoners and 81% of them were ordinary criminals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Zemskov

[poweronselftest]

What do you say to a person who cites Soviet statistics in earnest?

What do you say to a person who, in one comment, rails against incarceration in the United States, only to say that in the Soviet Union the GULAG wasn't so bad because... "87% of them were ordinary non-political criminals like thieves, cons, etc."

[ncmncm]

During WWII, German prisoners, and anybody else drafted into service for Germany and captured, were killed or sent to the Gulags. During and after the war, anyone who had been taken prisoner and returned to Soviet custody were considered deserters, and shot or sent to the Gulags. Civilians in places first overrun by German and then Soviet forces were considered collaborators and commonly killed or sent to the Gulags. The choice which often depended on availability of transportation.

Gulag terms were often only a few years because the lifespan of prisoners at many sites was short, particularly gold mines.

So, not just prisons or labor camps. It is hard to imagine how 81% or 87% could be identified as ordinary criminals in the absence of any semblance of due process. A tortured confession is not a verdict.

All that said, I welcome injections of nuance.

[poweronselftest]

> particularly gold mines.

The commenters who compared prisons in the United States with Gulags, where you were sent to dig for gold basically by hand, poorly dressed at -30C for 12 hours.

> So, not just prisons or labor camps. It is hard to imagine how 81% or 87% could be identified as ordinary criminals in the absence of any semblance of due process. A tortured confession is not a verdict.

It takes a special kind of ignorance to believe statistics like this, and then to believe that being a "thief" makes being sent to prison okay, while complaining about incarceration in the United States, where people are incarcerated for petty crimes. It is mind bending.

[mushbino]

I'm open to being wrong if you have evidence to the contrary, but you've only been offering anecdotes and ad-hominems.

[darawk]

Your comment was a littany of attempts at character assassination largely unrelated to the work in question. The idea that Russian gulags were "just a prison" is a ridiculous characterization that no historian would agree with. They were prisons for political prisoners, who were there warehoused there to keep them from speaking out against the regime, and they were put there without due process of law. The idea that that is even remotely comparable to the American judicial system is just completely ahistorical Stalinist apologism.

[mushbino]

A relatively small percentage were political prisoners, but when you compare the number of people who have received very lengthy sentences for minor drug possession, in some cases life, how is that any better? Not to mention Jim Crow in the US at the time. We have the largest prison population in the world by a considerable margin. Most of the people in our jails and prisons are there for drug offenses and crimes of poverty.

The US has a far larger prison population as a percentage of total population right now than the Soviet Union did even at the height of Stalin's purges. We have access to the Soviet archives now. We have actual numbers on these things.

[darawk]

Of course they were a small percentage. That just means they imprisoned a lot of people, though. The absolute number of political prisoners was extremely large, in the millions.

[poweronselftest]

There was no rule of law in the USSR. Sentencing was arbitrary. Your typical "thief" was quite often a person who inhabited the apartment someone else wanted, or a person who's position someone wanted at work. Write to the authorities that you saw them stealing: done! There were prison quotes to fill, most seriously. The United States has absolutely nothing on the Soviet Union.

Only a person who has no experience outside the realm of Western existence could believe such a thing as Soviet (or today, Chinese) statistics. People were disappeared, summarily shot in basements, all the time. The whole system worked like that, from prisoners in prisons to the production of basic commodities: https://soviet_intelligence.enacademic.com/381/Uzbek_Cotton_.... Everything was lies and murder.

[mushbino]

The height of the US prison population was in 2008 when about 1,000 in 100,000 U.S. adults were behind bars.

In the Soviet Union at the height of the Stalin purges is was about 714 to 892 imprisoned per 100,000 USSR residents.

From here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_in...

[mushbino]

How is this whataboutism? I'm in no way apologizing for gulags, but the "Socialism and Marxism always leads to utter destruction" take is so tired and insulting to those who actually study history and political science.

Also, this "Ultimately that adherence to a singular ideology, with aggressive suppression of all others, leads to every subsequent horror." You do realize this holds true under every economic system, right. It was true under feudalism and it's absolutely true under Capitalism. That's kind of the nature of a system.

Edit: The point of bringing up the anti-semitism and Fascism was to show that his views, pretty much all around, were strongly forbidden in the Soviet Union at the time. Absolute free speech works fairly well in America, but you have to understand that at the time in that part of the world there were many different cultures with high-tensions sharing the same space. If hate speech was allowed it would result in non-stop war. The same thing was the case in Yugoslavia where hate speech was strongly punished and it served the purpose of keeping the peace, until Tito died. The history of the Balkans illustrates this point quite well. Yes, we all love free speech, but endless wars are good for nobody.

FWIW, I've traveled through all of these countries extensively and Russian is my second language. I also speak a bit of Serbo-Croatian. Traveling around and speaking with these people changed the lens with which I view these things. There is more nuance than words can describe and the history is complicated to say the least.

[andreskytt]

When and where did you do your travels? Living in the former USSR I can absolutely confirm the history is way more complicated, than it is commonly presented. Changes over time, changes depending on people you speak to. In my country we have had read army, Finnish army and Waffen SS veterans living out their lives quite peacefully together but they would no doubt give you a very different perspective on how the GULAG felt. And it’s not that you can tell from the outside.

As to the ideology, I agree with you about fundamentalism leading to death and destruction. Marxism, however, contains the premise, that one particular class must be liquidated. Also, it requires people to behave in a very particular and unnatural way leading easily to a conclusion that these should be eliminated too. So maybe it lends itself better as a tool for madmen raising to power, than some others. Maybe it’s not that people trying to implement Marxism have ended up in chaos but that people seeking absolute power have tended to use it as an ideological cover and to rally a support?

[mushbino]

I was in St. Petersburg and Moscow last year and spent a month in Kyiv. I've been to Czech and Slovak republics the year before. Albania, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Bosnia, North Macedonia, Serbia, Belarus. Next on the list is Georgia, Armenia, Romania, and Bulgaria. I've been wanting to go to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan too.

The percentage of the population that ended up spending time in a work camp was about 2.5% and the average sentence was 2-3 years. It's terrible what happened, there's no two ways about it, but the transition from feudalism to capitalism was pretty horrendous beyond words.

Honestly, the history of the region is so complex that it's incredibly challenging to know where to begin.