"Sure living in USSR wasn't great, but if you think that's equivalent to being forced into slavery, you have left the plane of reasonable discourse. " A house

"Sure living in USSR wasn't great, but if you think that's equivalent to being forced into slavery, you have left the plane of reasonable discourse. " A house slave in the US was way better of, than a field slave, who were also way better off, than a slave in the mines. Their conditions were not equivalent, but slavery anyway. "a choice of career" Only as long as you strictly stayed in political line and had not the bad luck of someone denouncing you falsely. Or the bad luck of being born into the wrong family, etc. The slaves in the gulag surely had it worse, than the better off ones in Moscow. So yes, the average peasant might have their living standard and freedom raised, but everyone else (except party members) had theirs lowered. Equivalisation of misery, hurey. But we can probably end it here, because yes, generally not being allowed to leave the country, along with the daily terror of political totalitarian secret police qualifies clearly as a condition of slavery by my definition, to which you disagree in a discourse ending manner "you have left the plane of reasonable discourse."