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Comment by oddx | Hacker News Reader

1. Healthcare was avaliable in GULAG prisoners. And it was free of course 2. Yes, GULAG workers get 3 meals a day (often part as dry ration) 3. Workday in GULAG was about 10 hours, so yes they have about 6 hours leisure time.

But this isn't my point. Of course conditions in prison in modern US is better then in USSR 80 years ago. My point that you have higher probability go to jail in modern US then in USSR in thirtieth. Target for great terror in USSR was elite and it was insignificant (again, lesser then in modern US) for ordinary people.

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Not insignificant, however you look at the numbers. But more importantly, what could land you in jail was a simple political joke, or having ancestors of a wrong kind (the "class" of kulak, for instance, as it was defined in the Soviet penal code) or even, in some periods, a random chance.

I look at the numbers because they are something that can not be speculated and manipulated easily.

Lets take a claim "a random chance could land you in jail". I've seen numbers that percent miscarriage of justice in US is about 5-10% (not sure it's correct, but anyway even for death penalty there are many mistakes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution). So for modern US 0.05% (about 160000 people) are in jail by random chance. I don't have numbers of USSR and, again, I am not trying to compare. I show that you should be very careful when using simple claims without numbers.

Or let take "simple political joke". Do you know that in many modern countries you can go to jail for ten years just for telling something that is not accepted by mainstream (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#A...)? Again it's incorrect to compare. but I think raw numbers people in prison is quite accurate and objective estimate of "badness" of system. And for USSR in thirtieth numbers doesn't look very terrible.

Numbers can indeed be manipulated easily. I am sure you have heard the term Potemkin village. I am not sure you realize how prevalent this kind of deception is in the world outside of the US and a few other "Western" countries.

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