this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2024
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I believe in socialism, but I feel Stalin shouldn't be idolised due to things like the Gulag.

I would like more people to become socialist, but I feel not condemning Stalin doesn't help the cause.

I've tried to have a constructieve conversation about this, but I basically get angry comments calling me stupid for believing he did atrocious things.

That's not how you win someone over.

I struggle to believe the Gulag etc. Never happened, and if it happened I firmly believe Stalin should be condemned.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources.

Robert Conquest's The Great Terror (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off defector testimony.

Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponized information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.

He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash.

The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism".

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, Nazi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth.

Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A history (published 2003) draws directly from The Gulag Archipelago and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.

However, in contrast to these depictions, we have this interesting report produced by the CIA regarding the nature of the gulags, or "Forced Labor Camps" as they describe them. Let's take a second to note that this year, California voted to uphold their forced labor practices in the state, and that the US still maintains constitutionally protected forced labor as a form of punishment.

A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:

  1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
  2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
  3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
  4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies.
  5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
  6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
  7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.

In terms of scale, Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.

Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.

In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ...

Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ...

Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states...

This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, "over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision." That's 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States' Prison Industrial Complex today is larger than the USSR's Gulag system at its peak.

Regarding the "death rate", In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:

It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive...

Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hitler were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.

  • Timothy Snyder. (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

(Side note: Timothy Snyder is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)

This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not death camps.

Nor was it slave labor, exactly. In the camps, although labor was forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (minus expenses).

We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson....

The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled).

We can comb over the details all you want, but I don't think you care about the details. You are looking to reinforce your own personal bias, not correct it. You are not taking an objective and materialist view of history regarding the Stalin era of the USSR. Not even, at a minimum, drawing comparisons between the prisons in the Soviet Union and the current for-profit systems that exist today in America.

All this effort in this post will go on to be wasted, I feel. I do it, though because your post will attract others with similar questions, and hopefully those more willing to deprogram themselves will read it and do more investigating.

You're not going to build a socialist movement if you build it off the back of Cold War era red scare propaganda. You came to us with a simple question, and to fully understand the answer, you need to read more and deprogram yourself.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

An additional note on The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn's wife has admitted that it is not based on reliable information, but instead folklore of the camps.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Definitely saving a copy of this to have ready for debates with friends! Sources matter and shit coming from declassified CIA and not "some USSR propaganda." Not like the CIA is the most honest of sources, but this being stuff that wasn't meant for mass release makes it easier to put cracks in the anti-communist indoctrination of the western populace. Really shows how much we were failing to find actual proof of the stuff our leaders always kept spouting. The MIC wanted to use whatever war hawk lies to create conditions needed to make the money gun go burrr. Just like the lies about missile build-ups that weren't happening in the USSR before we claimed they were and started going nuts "closing the gap." Of course the USSR did start building-up, but not before we kept yelling about drastically increasing ours.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.

While he is at this labor, the convict works under the same conditions, and with the same protections that he would enjoy in outside labor. His hours are seven or eight a day, depending upon the nature of his work

Did it change between 1935 and 1954? Are Callcott and the CIA talking about different things? Genuine question, I wish to know.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

So I think the CIA is talking about specific camps, and it could be possible that these camps were operating different working hours, but maybe what Callcott is describing is an average or generalized notion of an eight-hour day across the entire system. From the first page of the CIA report, section (2), subsection (a), it states:

Forced Labor Camps ia the USSR: This six-page report provides detailed information on the organization of labor camps and on working and living conditions in camps the area of Bratsk (N 56-02, E 101-4O) and Tayshet (N 55-57, E 96-02) in Irkutsk Oblast. The bulk of this information concerns Ozerlag, [ REDACTED ] Other camps described In the report are Kraslag near Tayshet, Minlag in the Vorkuta area, and Vyatlag rear Verkhne-Kansk in Kirov Oblast.

So these camps might have been operating 10 hours days for a reason, and then changed that policy later.