| HN Mirror

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 1936 days ago

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.

> 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.

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

darawk 1936 days ago

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.

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 1936 days ago

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.

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.

JPKab 1936 days ago

Western intellectuals spent decades defending and minimizing Soviet atrocities, because like many intellectuals, they really believed Utopia is possible, if only everyone thought like them.

They still do. The admiration for the Chinese Communist Party's response to COVID has been very telling. Note that praise of Taiwan, who handled it phenomenally without welding people into apartment buildings, has been limited in comparison.

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...

This is a Whataboutism predicated on:

- the belief in Soviet statistics and

- a belief in the comparability of imprisonment in the United States and the Soviet Union.

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

Honest question: where do you get the information that you're operating on? It sounds like you're just presenting opinion and you don't know a whole lot about Soviet history, gulags, or the US prison system.

You do know that we have forced labor in the US and slavery is allowed under the 13th amendment if you are convicted of a crime. Prisoners are frequently lent out as cheap labor to private companies.

burntoutfire 1936 days ago

The stats talk about number of people imprisoned in a particular moment of time. It doesn't say if a part of them for example died over the next couple of months due to cold and starvation and were topped up with new inmates That would make the number look unchanged during the next count.