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cempaka

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Why do you need pictures of camp inmates to believe that the Gulag was an integral part of the system?

And (Nial?) Ferguson seems to be alive and well and speaking his mind freely, like wut? Was he de-banked recently?

Is Nial Ferguson really your idea of a troublesome dissident?

> To understand what is at stake in the fight against the axis of China, Russia and Iran, just read “The Lord of the Rings.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-21/china-...

I have to assume this isn't whom the parent had in mind, it's just too funny otherwise.

Do you realize the that the in your quote Smithsonian is describing Solzhenitsyn's argument, not editorializing?

Do you know that Solzhenitsyn was a Russian author and Soviet dissident and critic who spent years the Gulag prison system?

The absence of photographic evidence from the gulags doesn’t negate their existence. The Soviets deliberately restricted documentation of the camps, and destroyed records before and during the fall of the USSR.

> If it was so essential to the Soviet system, where were all the images of millions of prisoners in gulags after the Berlin Wall fell?

This doesn't really make sense as an objection; the gulags were (mostly) long emptied by then, and the collapse followed. Correlation is clearly there; causation is something you can argue either way.

Navalny died in a ex-Gulag labor camp.

How long emptied, exactly?

That's kind hard to pin down. Khrushchev did mass amnesty to clear them; Brezhnev went right back to mass imprisonments; Gorbachev loosened things up.

Again, Navalny died in one of the more notorious Gulag sites; it never completely went away.

A single prisoner dying in a remaining camp now being used as a prison in 2024 is a far cry from making the argument that "gulags were essential to the Soviet system."

You asked when the system ended; I pointed out it never really ended, it just got smaller. Putin's clearly using the "kill off the dissidents" playbook.

The argument that gulags were essential is "when their use was drastically reduced, the Soviet Union declined". I think that's overly focused on one element - the collapse had many causes - but easing up on dissidents is likely to have played at least a part. I'm not surprised today's neo-Stalinists yearn for a return to the system.

My wife's grandfather had to endure the horrors of a soviet gulag and came back almost starved to death. A 1.9m tall man who weighed less than 50kg.

And then revisionists like you come along and start questioning things because you in person haven't seen it. Well, I guess lucky you.

I haven't made any argument that no gulags ever existed, or that no one was ever mistreated in them. I imagine it was especially rough to be in one when resources were being poured into ending Nazi Germany's salt-the-earth campaign during Barbarossa.

Nice deflection. Except that Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned after the war and his personal experience comes from 1945-1953, well after Barbarossa had anything to do with it. It wasn't much better in the 1970s and 1980s either. I knew a person who was sentenced to 6 years of hard labor for human rights activism in 1975. Upon his arrival in Perm-36 camp, he was greeted with "we run a humane establishment and don't kill people; we torture you long enough that you die on your own". According to him, the turnaround was very high indeed, up to 20% of prisoners his section died each year.

In 1996, he returned with other fellow inmates and established a private museum. The museum's staff were labeled "foreign agents" and the museum was forcibly taken over by Russian government when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. All mention of Stalin was erased, exhibitions about crimes against humanity and the fight for human rights were revamped in favor of a more "balanced" approach:

   "We don't want to take sides," the museum's new head of exhibitions, Yelena Mamayeva, said shortly after being appointed. "We're trying to talk more about the architectural complex [of the camp], and not to get involved in assessing specific people who served sentences there, and assessing Stalin, and so on. Because right now this is not quite politically correct."

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-perm-gulag-museum-takeover-co...

Instead of warning future generations about the dangers of totalitarianism, the museum now celebrates timber output of the camp and tries to present forced singing of songs praising the government that brutalized them as a rich cultural program offered to the inmates.

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