The end of the GULAG myth

I have always been saying to everybody that the tales about the Stalinist terror in 1930s and 40s were, to put it mildly, an unjustified exaggeration. In the pre- war Soviet Union there were no more prisoners than in any other country of the time, and the conditions of their existence were hardly ever worse than in Great Britain, or the USA. It is much later, many years after Stalin's death, that the prison economy of the USSR has become somewhat retarded compared to that of the leading capitalist countries; however, that retardation was rather a result of the cold war and severe economic pressure from the outside than an innate tendency of socialist society: the country simply could not allow spending enough resources to improve the living conditions in prisons and colonies. However, the percent of prisoners was around 2-2.5 % of the total population in all the times, and they were mostly ordinary criminals, like in the other countries, and well deserved punishment in accordance with the existing law.

I knew people who were imprisoned in that time, and I talked to their relatives. Some of my own relatives pretended to be the victims of Stalin's terror too. However, as I could judge, the overwhelming majority were punished because they acted against the law, and no normal society would tolerate violating the fundamental norms of legality appropriate to that very society.

Of course, one must judge according to the economic and political order of a particular state, rather than from any abstract idea. The law in the USSR was different from the law of any capitalist country, and it would be absurd to interpret any case on the basis of bourgeois conceptions, as most modern propagandists do. Obviously, what is normal business from the bourgeois viewpoint, is a violation of the basic principles of socialist economy, and hence a serious crime. On the contrary, any act suppressing the private enterprise would be considered a crime in a capitalist country, while being socially sanctioned in a non-market society. To put it plain, those who fought with the Soviet regime were criminals from the standpoint of that regime, but those who profited from their acts would hardly ever call them criminals, blaming the regime instead.

That is what I well understood since early childhood. But the public opinion in the later USSR was carefully manipulated by bourgeois propaganda, so that few people could believe me, impressed by the millions of names and colorful descriptions of the awful concentration camps. Nobody compared that with what happened in the rest of the world. This is the worst form of lie, using biased extractions from real data to distort the true picture.

No doubt, there were innocent victims --- like in any other country. A penal machine is always vulnerable, and it can be manipulated by dishonest people, and it can never be flexible enough to avoid fallacies. I knew people who were sent to Kolyma for nothing, from mere prejudice. But such people did not complain that they were unlawfully punished, they did not blame socialism, and many of them remained true communists despite all the heavy experience, and they did their best to improve the people's life, even by the cost of their own life. Compare that with those who shouted about communist terror, but always managed to keep their wealth and health, and return to their criminal activities after imprisonment, and who, after all, ruined the USSR and built new capitalist societies on the bones of millions robbed of anything at all. A capitalist would never admit that a person dying of hunger a thousand miles away is murdered by the capitalist economy; a bourgeois would protest if called a murderer --- yes, he slaughtered nobody, he merely smothered people economically, merely did not allow them to live.

Today, the truth finds at least timid public expression. In Moskovskaya Pravda, a semi-official daily of the Moscow government, an article by Eric Kotlyar was published, which compared the number of prisoners and their living conditions in the modern Russia and former USSR. The full text of the article can be found on this site, as an MS Word file (in Russian). It has been found that the percent of prisoners in Russian is nearly the same as in Stalin's time, but the prisoners' life became much worse after the restoration of capitalism. As Kotlyar writes, the death rate in GUIN (the modern analog of GULAG) is so high that a chief of any Stalinist prison would have been immediately dismissed, at the very first inspection. It is much easier to put people in prison without guilt today than it was during the fabulous Stalinist terror.

Indeed, one would rather wonder how the Soviet powers managed to keep GULAG so small, and the penal system so tolerant, in the pre-war and immediate post-war conditions, with that intense undermining work of all the highly developed capitalist countries, with that low overall level of public consciousness and all- penetrating ideological corruption. It can only be attributed to the profound truth of the communist idea, that the Soviet Union existed for 70 years, instead of a few months, and became one of the most powerful countries of the world --- though not powerful enough for the final victory of the new socioeconomic formation.