Real talk: What should be done with people like this after the revolution? : TheDeprogram

Counterpoints

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:

Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas

From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.

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.

Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies.

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.

A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.

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.

• Saed Teymuri. (2018). The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA

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 N@zis 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...

• Michael Parenti. (1997). Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

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.

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 Hit1er were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.

• Timothy Snyder. (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit1er 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 labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour was forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less 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).

• L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG

Additional Resources

Video Essays:

The Gulag Argument | TheFinnishBolshevik (2016)

Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions! | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018)

French work camps 1852-1953 worse than gulag | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018)

"The Gulags of the Soviet Union: There's a Lot More Than What Meets the Eye | Comrade Rhys (2020)

Books, Articles, or Essays:

Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence | J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov (1993)

Listen:

"Blackshirts & Reds" (1997) by Michael Parenti, Part 4: Chapters 5 & 6. #Audiobook + Discussion. | Socialism For All / S4A ☭ Intensify Class Struggle (2022)

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