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.
I would encourage you to look at the Soviet statistics on the Ukrainian famine, and ask yourself if any of them can be trusted, and why you have trusted them in the past.
We're talking about a government that suppressed its own scientists to a point where a critical design flaw in a nuclear reactor was ignored until the world's worst nuclear accident occurred.
And like a good little ideologue, you proceed with whataboutism, assuming that people like me haven't called legislators to demand an end to private prisons and prison labor. I have.
You're setting up straw men and attributing lots of arguments to me that I'm not making. I spent a month in Kyiv last year, went to the Holodomor museum, and just finished a book about it not too long ago. The famine was very much a real thing. I've also been to Chernobyl, but I'm not sure why you're bringing any of this up.
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.
- the belief in Soviet statistics and
- a belief in the comparability of imprisonment in the United States and the Soviet Union.