this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (31 children)

my problem with this thread; u can't tell who is actually communist and authoritarian, and who is just authoritarian

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (20 children)

The difference is whether you get sent to a concentration camp or a gulag.

Oh, I guess they are pretty similar...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (19 children)

Uh, depending on the concentration camp, not really.

I don't want to defend gulags but they didn't have poison shower rooms or child corpse disposal staff.

Working your slaves to death sometimes, sure, but you mostly came out the gulag alive.

Broken, but alive. Historians estimate that of about 20 million people sent to the gulags about 1.5 million died in them.

Which is a horrific example of compliance through terror but not quite the same thing as an extermination program.

Don't minimize the Holocaust on your way to agree with everyone else that tankies are delusional assholes.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just for information the death count of gulags is largely unknown. Russia itself says its 1 million but pretty much all other sources say its too low to be even believable. There are credible sources for 1.5 to 8 million deaths (also non-credible sources that go much higher). Unfortunately unlike the nazies, soviets did not really have record keeping at all so all sources are estimates based to prisoner and guard writings. Another factor that makes estimates hard is the practice of when a prisoner was near death they would be shipped home, a lot of those never made it home but don't count as killed by a gulag.

There was also mass deportations from satellite states that weren't sent to gulags presumably but that's a different thing.

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