The responses here show a depressing ignorance of the Soviet era, which was a time of massive industrialization using a system of forced labour. Western apologists for Stalinism continued to tout the "success" of this project right up to the fall of the Soviet Union.
It is good we are still able to hear the voices of the dead from the Gulag, not just to be reminded of who they were and how they died as a result of deliberate Soviet policy, but to be reminded of how badly misunderstood and misremembered the horrors of that policy are.
If the US prison system deliberately killed millions of people over decades by systematic intent to create industrial infrastructure in a nation previously dominated by peasant farming it would be comparable. Otherwise, not so much.
That the Soviet system deliberately killed millions of people over decades is not in dispute. The purpose of the Gulag is well-documented. But there are as always Denialists who will believe what they want and claim anything they think is remotely plausible to justify it.
It is good we are still able to hear the voices of the dead from the Gulag, not just to be reminded of who they were and how they died as a result of deliberate Soviet policy, but to be reminded of how badly misunderstood and misremembered the horrors of that policy are.
If the US prison system deliberately killed millions of people over decades by systematic intent to create industrial infrastructure in a nation previously dominated by peasant farming it would be comparable. Otherwise, not so much.
That the Soviet system deliberately killed millions of people over decades is not in dispute. The purpose of the Gulag is well-documented. But there are as always Denialists who will believe what they want and claim anything they think is remotely plausible to justify it.
http://www.amazon.com/Gulag-Archipelago-Abridged-Experiment-...